Extending a consolidation spree by players that include
Yahoo and ESPN, Fantasy Sports Ventures said Monday that it has acquired football
tipster TheHuddle.com.
Though financial details were not disclosed, the purchase
price was for seven figures, according to Whitney Walters, co-founder of
TheHuddle, based in Lake Tahoe,
Nevada.
New York City-based Fantasy Sports Ventures has cobbled
together a network of six owned and 64 affiliated fantasy sports sites that
both complement and compete against media giants like ESPN, Yahoo, CBS, Time
Warner’s AOL, and News Corp.’s Fox.
Christopher J. Russo, a former general manager of the
National Football League’s new media businesses, founded Fantasy Sports Ventures
in late 2005 and has funded the company through angel investors.
“Certainly there’s a lot of venture capital interest in the
space and in our company, but we’ve pursued alternative financing at the
moment,” he said.
Mr. Russo, no relation to New York City sports radio personality
Christopher “Mad Dog” Russo, said that by pulling together fantasy sports
companies under one corporate umbrella, Fantasy Sports will be able to offer
advertisers a single point of access to an avid audience of young male sports
fans.
“Our perspective is there are a number of niche fantasy
content sites and [they] could be brought together in a larger property,” he said. “Prior
to our putting this together, it was hard for advertisers to reach these
one-off properties. There’s a huge opportunity in advertising sales, but you
need traffic.”
In fantasy sports, football, baseball, basketball, and hockey
fans take on the role of general manager, spending fantasy dollars to draft
players onto mock teams. The teams compete in fantasy leagues run by media companies like Yahoo and the NFL itself. Each team's success
is based on the stats of the players drafted.
To improve their chances, fantasy league players often
consult web sites like TheHuddle.com for scouting and injury reports, and analysis
of upcoming games.
Mr. Russo said the network has an estimated 3 million unique
users and the typical fantasy player spends five or six hours online per week
managing their teams.
A study released in August by the Fantasy Sports Trade
Association said that 19.4 million people in the United
States and Canada participate in fantasy
sports.
Mr. Walters, is a former computer programmer with Electronic
Data Systems and IBM who co-founded TheHuddle with David Dorey in 1997, allowing
him to tap his knowledge of coding and love of football.
In February, ESPN acquired fantasy site Talented Mr. Roto, while
in June, Yahoo snapped up Rivals.com for about $100 million.