Making money from fantasy sports

A post I wrote a few months ago speculating that Fox would some day acquire a wildly popular fantasy soccer site called Hattrick, has been causing a small global stir in the Hattrick community in the past few days. A reader named chamo summed it up nicely in the comments:

"...After that this blog has and is being commented in all the forums all over the world. Thouthands of eyes have read this article. Im from Peru and we are talking about it."

I thought this might be a good opportunity to get a reader discussion going about a topic that's been intriguing me for a while - How can companies make money from online fantasy sports?

Now the idea is NOT to say - 'we got all these users, now lets slap the game pages with evil ads and make shitloads of money'. That would be stupid. Fantasy sports are all about the passion of the players, so any short term monetization scheme that doesn't chime with the gameplay would fail fairly quickly.

What I'm looking for here are intelligent ways to monetize the game while keeping the players passionate about it. Think long term; Think of elements that integrate with the game play and enhance them; Think of ways beyond the obvious two: banner ads and charging gamers to play.

The rules: If you have any ideas you'd like to share - post them as comments below. Any ideas posted here are free for the world to take and execute on.

Comments

[ouriel]

i will soon have an answer for you ...

[josh]

I saw that the Lgilab.com are investing in some new Fantasy Sport company, they are intending to launch a Fantasy game called http://www.PlaySPex.com, playspex as for
"playSPEX- The Sports Exchange", maybe this is the answer you are looking for, i only can imagine what those guys are intending to do.

[Mike T]

I have brainstormed several different ideas for fantasy sports companies. I lack the web 2.0 knowledge to get them off the ground, but would gladly discuss some of the ideas