The concept of daily fantasy sports is one of those strokes of genius that you wonder why it took so long for someone to offer it to the public in exchange for a lot of money. Blogging has Twitter and Tumblr, when somebody figured out that people would go crazy for bite-sized microblogs. Video has YouTube and then VineTube, when someone figured out that 6-second videos were actually a great idea. And finally, sports betting has fantasy sports and then daily fantasy sports, when somebody miraculously figured out that people would love placing microbets not on entire seasons or games, but just individual player performance reset daily. What a novel idea. (If anyone has a microidea that splits up a popular industry into bite-sized pieces, perhaps you should pursue it.)
With Yahoo now entering the daily fantasy sports arena, the whole industry is taking a huge leap forward. No one knows exactly how this will play out. On one extreme, it could be similar to when Google entered search, and Yahoo could finally be redeeming itself, somewhat, from its late 90’s loss of the title of King of the Internet. On the other extreme, it could be similar to when Google entered social media with Google Plus and nobody cared. Chances are, it will be something in between.
One could argue that Yahoo Daily Fantasy Sports will flop like Google Plus because just like Google was never thought of as a social media brand, Yahoo is not generally thought of as a betting site. But Yahoo’s foray into Daily Fantasy Sports won’t be a failure, because Google ventured into social media ex nihilo, out of nothing. Yahoo at least has a serious fantasy sports user base of 6.235 million back in 2013 (ergo more now). Converting a fantasy sports user base paying small fees and driving ad revenue into a daily fantasy sports user base paying into a betting pool is not nearly as hard as converting searchers plugging keywords into your search engine to a user base that suddenly wants to click on your social media buttons.
As much as Google has pulverized Yahoo in search, Yahoo still has advantages that Google hasn’t been able to touch. Primarily, those advantages are finance and sports. I am not much of a sports fan, but personally, I can attest to finance. Yahoo Finance is vastly superior to Google Finance in almost every way. I would go so far as to say that the only real advantage Google Finance has over Yahoo is the flash graphs. If Marissa Meyer ever figures out that she should put flash graphs on Yahoo Finance, I would never use Google Finance again.