Fantasy + Footy
On a trip to Melbourne early this year, Ned from Electrorash told me about FanFooty – an Australian Rules Fantasy Football site pulling in extraordinary traffic.
Intrigued, I tracked down Paul Montgomery - the site’s founder - to find out how a one-man-band managed to pull in 2.67 million page views on 65,000 unique in the first week of the 2009 AFL season.
Paul Montgomery
Why do you think Fan Footy has worked?
I have always believed in the power of hard work, though of course you have to be lucky. I believe that to have a successful business, use a time machine and start one five years ago. We’re in our fourth full year of FanFooty, and we’re just about to hit tipping point, without ever having done advertising or aligning ourselves with a major media property. The traffic has come in part from SEO, of course, but also word of mouth.
On the SEO side, I found quickly that it was very easy to rank highly in Google for players’ names, because there weren’t many pages about individual football players out there on the Net, especially three or four years ago. That has been the major source of Google traffic. I have never managed to rank on the first page for the most-trafficked keyword in the sector - “afl dream team” - but the long tail of player names has driven a lot of clickthroughs anyway.
On the word of mouth side, I just think it’s a good product that fills a niche. The vast majority of FanFooty traffic comes from the live scoring pages, and they are popular because (a) they provide info that the official AFL site does not, like injuries, reports, matchups, who’s running hot or cold etc, and (b) the site is built for low-bandwidth Internet connections, meaning that people on dialup and people with bandwidth caps love FanFooty because it is fast and doesn’t hurt their cap with a lot of useless graphical junk.
Refereeing Fantasy.
How did you come up with the FanFooty concept?
I have a few online friends who are American, and in 2004 they included me in one of their NFL fantasy leagues, which sucked me in with all of the statsitcis and analysis that the US media provides, and I ended up winning the league on the last Sunday of the season with a touchdown in the last quarter. That hooked me for life!
So I looked around the Australian industry and saw we were years an years behind the American experience and set out FanFooty as one of the companies that would build the Australian fantasy football scene to somewhere near the level of maturity that the US has seen.
What is the grand plan for Fan Footy?
It has been a long journey, but I can see a position now where my traffic is rivalling that of bigger sites, thus they are going to take notice of me and provide possible exits. For instance, FanFooty’s traffic for the week just gone was larger in page views than the official AFL Dream Team site… something I never thought would happen. The other major growth area is in expanding outside fantasys to provide a full statistical live scoring facility with not just fantasy scores but also a bunch of other “exotic” statistics and other things I’ve got in mind.
However, there are political obstacles to doing this without being backed by a major media partner, and may not be possible anyway due to the exclusive Telstra deal that is limiting so much AFL Internet content - and, incidentally, has allowed FanFooty oxygen to grow because I have been outside the process for so long and don’t play by their rules.
FanFooty caught biggers sites with their pants down.
Could you see this working for other sports? Do you consider other fan leagues as competitors?
I can see the FanFooty model working for other sports, especially rugby league, but historically the audience for non-AFL fantasy competitions has been almost negligible in comparison. Last time I looked, the official AFL Dream Team competition had ten times the registrations of the NRL Dream Team. This may have changed this year, but I’ve been flat out managing the AFL end so haven’t had a chance to expand.
I don’t see other fantasy leagues as competitors. I ran my own competition last year called Lethal League, with just on $5000 of prizemoney that came out of my own pocket, but I had to drop that in 2009 after talks with a corporate partner fell through. FanFooty has alwasy been about supporting other competitions, in fact, providing auxiliary services to make Dream Team and Super Coach better experiences for the fantasy coach.
FanFooty’s a winner.
***
Speaking to Paul backs up something I’ve believed for a long time - online sports content in Australia has a long way to grow. Telstra’s stranglehold means that a lot of nimble hands are tied, but it’s only a matter of time before sports fans start demanding better.
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