Who: Paul Charchian
What: Co-Founder, Fanball; radio host; founder, LeagueSafe

How far back do you think this fantasy sports industry goes back? Sure, we all know about the GOPPPL starting fantasy football back in the 1960s, but what about this era of magazines and websites and podcasts and more advice than anyone can sort through?

Well, it’d probably be tough to find much fantasy content that predated the 1993 launch of Fantasy Football Weekly.

“There was no information available of any kind once the season started,” says Paul Charchian, who co-founded the magazine in Minnesota’s Twin Cities with Rob Phythian.

Charchian says the magazine instantly outsold Sports Illustrated on Minneapolis newsstands, which led to it being rolled out nationally in 1994. Today, most people are probably more familiar with the name of the parent company, Fanball, which remains among the industry’s most prominent outlets for fantasy content and league hosting.

Charchian wasn’t new to fantasy football, either, when the magazine got started. His introduction to the game came more than a decade before, in 1979, when the seventh-grader made some rookie quarterback out of Morehead State his first fantasy selection ever. Although Phil Simms went on to throw nearly 200 touchdown passes and play for two Super Bowl-champion Giants teams, he completed just 50.6 percent of his passes that year for 13 touchdowns and 14 picks.

“Shows you what I knew,” says Charchian, who — as a Vikings fan — can’t even blame the choice on homerism.

Fortunately, he learned a few things over the years, and Charchian began to make a name for himself at the same time that his magazine was taking off. KFAN, a sports talk radio station in Minneapolis, began to bring him on as a guest in 1993 after Fantasy Football Weekly came out. By 1995, Charchian had his own weekend fantasy show, which today is the country’s longest-running fantasy program. Along the way, he also added a midweek video game show on KFAN, as well as pregame duties for the Vikings.

KFAN’s programming is no longer nationally syndicated, but its previous exposure as such and his offerings via Fanball helped to turn Charchian into a national fantasy football figure. He has become known for developing new strategies, such as the “do the opposite” motto he still swears by. Whereas many fantasy owners will use the first few rounds to stock up on running backs, Charchian recommends following the method that he attributes to George Costanza and going after the top guys at quarterback and receiver before turning your attention to backs.

His latest venture stands apart from the actual game of fantasy, though, and looks to capitalize on the money fantasy owners put into their leagues. LeagueSafe.com takes on the burden of collecting league fees, delivering end-of-season payouts and going after deadbeat owners (nonviolently), and its recent launch claims much of Charchian’s time these days. Of course, it doesn’t claim enough to keep him away from the fun side.

FantasyVictory.com is the content arm of LeagueSafe, and Charchian also supplies weekly video for OpenSports.com.

“It’s fun staying on the content side,” he says.

Lest anyone worry that he’s too busy these days, Charchian assures that his attention to football detail hasn’t lapsed.

“If you’re going to keep up with it you’ve gotta keep up with it,” he says, conceding that the time crunch means some of the other stuff might slip.

So what is the other stuff for someone who started playing fantasy 29 years ago? One would think he’d be at least knee-deep in all the basic sports, but Charchian says that after football, his favorite fantasy leagues are actually golf, movies and “American Idol.”

The movie league scores pretty simply, with the winner in each of the year’s three seasons being the player whose movies grossed the most at domestic box offices. The Idol league lets owners add a contestant a week and score on a weekly basis with more points awarded for contestants who have been on the roster longer.

Most importantly, all of the various work he has done in the industry and the increased corporatization of fantasy — “It’s definitely more of a business,” he says. “It feels like more of a business” — haven’t soured Charchian at all toward the games that first drew him in.

Company: Fantasy Football Toolbox
Launched: 1996
Full time: 2007
Site: www.fftoolbox.com

It would probably be a bit of an exaggeration to say that everyone who starts up their own website (or any other business) does so with the ultimate goal of making a living with it. One would have to imagine, though, that most such ventures are built on that dream.

Jeff Christiansen, for one, enjoys spending all of his professional effort on the site he has been running for 12 years.

“I enjoyed programming, but I’m happy to be my own boss,” he says of running FFToolbox.com full time since 2007.

Christiansen — a former ColdFusion programmer — launched Fantasy Football Arsenal in summer 1996, as an outlet for the publication of fantasy football cheatsheets he was already compiling.

“I realized I was onto something when I started getting emails from people asking me for help with their teams and to update my rankings,” he said.

What he also soon realized as the site began to get more visitors was that it shared its name with a popular member of probably the world’s best known sports league — England’s Premiership. The arrival of e-mails from Arsenal fans asking where they could find information on their favorite football team led Christiansen to his current online residence at FFToolbox.com.

Fantasy Football Toolbox got in early on the game of fantasy advice and continues to pride itself on the kind of technological advantage one would expect from a site created by a programmer.

“We try to stay on top of the latest technology,” Christiansen says. “For example, we offer several different RSS feeds, we launched our weekly online fantasy football radio show in August, and we have a fan page on Facebook.”

Also, as you might expect from the name, the site features a number of draft- and management-related tools. Player rankings go deep enough to even include offensive lines, return men and punters. Myriad tools help users do everything from getting to know the players to preparing their draft work area to even naming their teams.

The team-name generator offers five categories from which it will randomly offer 20 possible names at a time. A few quick clicks offered me winners such as “Preferred Woodchucks,” “Enthusiastic Moose,” “Familiar Cockroaches,” “Rotten Lions” (which is, of course, already taken by a real NFL team), “Useless Dingoes,” “Comprehensive Backhoes,” “Enormous Screwdrivers” (which will quickly be appropriated by that one male friend of yours who doesn’t know why he isn’t married yet) and “Corporate Stallions” (the team of CEOs that no one else in the bowling league likes).

The most worthwhile tool on the site, though, has to be the customizable cheatsheets, which allow users to adjust for their scoring systems, league sizes and roster sizes.

Although the site’s name contains only football, Fantasy Football Toolbox offers content in other areas as well. In addition to the 10 freelance writers covering the primary focus, five writers are devoted to the NFL Draft, five more to baseball and one to NASCAR. Baseball and NBA Draft coverage were just added this year, while the NFL Draft joined the menu in 2006 and NASCAR pulled in back in 2004.

The site turns a profit and supports its freelance staff with the advertising that was added in 2001, Christiansen says, and because he brought with him the programming background, the startup costs were minimal. Fantasy Football Toolbox also offers all of its features for free in an interface that is purposely devoid of unnecessary aesthetic treats.

“We focus on having a clean, fast and easy-to-use interface without a lot of unnecessary images or effects,” Christian says.