Dr. Kim Beason, professor at Ole Miss University and FSB-appointed “godfather of fantasy sports market research,” has sent out the call for consumer lists for the next round of studies, in conjunction with the Fantasy Sports Trade Association.

Below is the text of his request:

Everyone,

Dr. Kim Beason of the University of Mississippi will be begin our sixth annual FSTA consumer behavior/market survey shortly and is once again seeking input from the FSTA membership and subject lists. The survey includes more than 40 questions and provides great insight into the behavioral habits of fantasy players. New data lines for 2008-09 include social networks’ influence on fantasy sport, fantasy-consumer brand preferences and investigation into free-play providers, to name a few. Of course, you can forward any question ideas you have to Dr. Beason soon so that he may add them to the questionnaire.

A hot list of consumer names that Dr. Beason can use to select a representative sample would be VERY helpful to assure the FSTA research is the best available. In order to accurately reflect the tendencies of fantasy players, we’d like as many FSTA members to help out as possible. Your contact list is confidential and Dr. Kim will not release your consumer contact information. Please help out as we’d like a good cross-section of free sites, pay sites, baseball sites, racing sites, football sites, all sports sites, mail-order games, high-stakes games, etc.

If you have confidentiality clauses that prohibit sharing your clients’ contact information you may want to consider embedding a link in your website that would lead your interested members to the survey or send an email to your customers yourself with the survey http address attached. Another option that may take more time is building a list of your consumers willing to take part in the survey.

Remember: any contributor that generates a response of at least 100 subjects for the study will receive a detailed, exclusive demographic account of your customers’ responses free and additional exploration of your customers at reasonable rates. From past experiences, to generate 100 responses requires current and reliable customer lists of at least 4,000. If you embed the link you can remind consumers to respond throughout the data-collection period. The larger the list of your customers, the easier to select a random sample and increase the responses.

For 2008-09 I request consumer lists with last names beginning with U through Z and A through C.
The main fall consumer behavior study will begin in December and conclude January 10, 2009. The spring survey period will begin in May and conclude August.

An e-mailed prepared list (the best, helps establish trends), embedded website link or protected e-mail sent through your server will assure we have an industry-wide representation of the fantasy sports industry. Contact Dr. Kim for details on email links and HTML tags.

Deadlines:

1. Suggestions for survey questions — Sept. 1.
2. Lists of subjects we can use for a random survey. Please include Name, Full Address, and email. We send both email and U.S postal surveys each year. — ASAP, but no later than Oct. 31.
3. Email link you can send to your consumers — Aug. 25-Oct. 1
4. HTML link for your members-only website — Aug. 25-Oct. 1

Dr. Kim Beason
225 Turner Center
University, MS 38677
662-915-5555
hpbeason@olemiss.edu

A new report by eMarketer finds that sports websites will pull in just more than $1.7 billion in revenue this year and approach $3 billion by 2012.

The study projects that total revenue will more than double over the six-year period beginning with 2007. Sports websites collected $1.489 billion in total revenue last year, according to the report, Sports Site Marketing: Ad Revenue Models Pull Ahead. The number is expected to become $2.955 billion by 2012.

Although sports sites currently depend on pay content for a large portion of their revenue streams, advertising is expected to be the big growth area over the next few years. Whereas the eMarketer numbers call for just a 43 percent increase in revenue from pay content from 2007 to 2012, the projections have advertising revenues climbing by about 138 percent, from $812,000 last year to $1.95 million in 2012.

We can only assume that fantasy sports sites will make up a significant portion of this group, as recent FSTA and Ipsos research has shown the fantasy market growing at a rate of about 23 percent a year over the past five years. As the studies have also shown, online fantasy users are a rapt audience, and one that tends to be on the young side and earn a decent amount of money on average. That’s just the kind of group advertisers like to reach.

Those ad dollars are just waiting for fantasy providers to go out and grab them.