After years of rapid growth in its consumer base, the fantasy sports industry saw things plateau a bit in the past year, according to two sets of research presented by Ipsos’ Aaron Amic and Dr. Kim Beason at the FSTA conference this week.

Over the previous five years, fantasy consumers were increasing at an average rate of about 23 percent. In the past year, though, Ipsos found that about the same number of people reported playing fantasy sports in the United States and Canada as had in the year prior.

It stands to reason that the big growth stats from the early 2000s wouldn’t continue forever, but why did the upward trend go flat at this point?

Is it money? No. Even in the toughest economic times that many of us have every seen, most of the respondents to the Ipsos suvery who had never played fantasy or quit said their decision was based on a mere lack of interest. On top of that, it’s always been true that many more fantasy players go for free leagues than pay games.

Is the audience maturing without bringing in new young people? It doesn’t seem that way. According to Ipsos, the 12-17 and 18-34 age ranges presented the largest saturation of fantasy players (i.e., a larger percentage within each of those groups played fantasy in the past year than the numbers for other ranges sampled).

Is it a matter of us all hitting a period that just required folks to turn their attention elsewhere? Maybe. The time commitment was another reason cited by those who gave up or avoided fantasy. Even if tightening budgets didn’t keep them away, perhaps sheer concern for their jobs and bank accounts led more people to decide they couldn’t afford to join a league.

Was it just a strange year? Perhaps. One year hardly constitutes a trend, and things could look significantly different in 2010.

Over the coming days and weeks, FSB.com will check in with folks around the industry to see what they think of the growth plateau and whether fantasy companies need to change anything to counter it. We’ll also get more into the material presented in this year’s editions of the annual Fantasy Sports Trade Association studies.

(For those of you you might have arrived late to the FSB party, here’s another chance to get acquainted with the first business we profiled.)

Company: Advanced Sports Media LLC
Sites: www.draftanalyzer.com and www.playersearch.com
Founder and CEO: Ted Kasten
Launched: 2004
Full time: 2004

Back in 2004, Ted Kasten believed the fantasy football marketplace needed a better draft companion than the “static and outdated rankings provided by magazines,” at least according to the company bio at draftanalyzer.com. To fill the void, he developed Draft Analyzer and launched Draft Dynamix, which now resides under the umbrella of Advanced Sports Media.

The plan that started the whole venture, though, began to form at least two years earlier.

“I began designing the Draft Analyzer prototype as a fun side project on nights and weekends in 2002, when I needed help as a commissioner tracking everyone’s draft picks,” Kasten says.

As those of us who play fantasy sports - or video games, for that matter - well know, it takes folks with such a geek streak to come up the innovations that enhance our games. Kasten’s fun, self-serving side project quickly started to grow.

After beginning with just the draft tracker, he says, he continued to add features that took the platform from merely keeping up with picks to helping him build a better team. Those features include the ability to draw in and combine rankings from various online fantasy-content providers into printable cheat sheets.

The Analyzer also carries a proprietary player-recommendation engine, for which Kasten submitted a federal patent application before launching his business. (Maybe I could explain the algorithmic workings of that tool if I hadn’t skipped out on math classes in college.) Once Kasten had Draft Analyzer build, he headed for the March 2004 Fantasy Sports Trade Association conference, a move he said was crucial to starting and growing his business.

I left the conference with three key partnerships, a better understanding of the fantasy sports market and the confidence that I could be a leader in this critical market niche,” Kasten says. “I became a staple at the FSTA conferences and had a booth showing my software every time. All of my partnerships have come from meeting people at the FSTA conference.

From there, Kasten has licensed his product to five of the top six fantasy football league-hosting sites - including ESPN and CBS Sports - and taken home two industry awards. Draft Analyzer claimed the FSTA’s Best Draft Assistance Tool prize in 2005 and 2007, and the player-recommendation engine was a finalist for best innovation in 2005.

With Draft Analyzer plugging along, Draft Dynamix became Advanced Sports Media in February of this year, the same time that it launched PlayerSearch.

“It took forever to dig through numerous websites to find the latest information on individual players,” Kasten says of his motivation to create a search tool. “There is an enormous amount of great sports content sites, and more and more of them are offering everything for free. We are simply trying to bring all of the great sports content to the surface of the Web, much like Google has for general search.”

PlayerSearch.com does just what it says, gathering news, video, blog posts and the like that relate to a particular athlete and grouping the links in categories national news sources, local video and podcasts.

“We are not trying to create another sports portal. That has been done,” Kasten says. “All of our links take users to the original article or video, so the publisher gets full credit for their work. The ultimate goal of PlayerSearch is to make it quick and easy to access the best sports content on the Web.”

In addition to its free-standing site, PlayerSearch offers a widget that can be picked up by other sites. SportsBuff.com, which is part of the same company that owns this site, is among those that carry the widget.

Who: Dr. Kim Beason

What: Associate professor, park and recreation management, Ole Miss

Founder, Fantasy Sport Research Specialists LLC

Back in 2001, Dr. Beason went searching for studies on fantasy sports consumers, curious to find out why people played and what impact these games had on professional sports. He found the area lacking. Seeing a need for better understanding of this growing phenomenon, he decided to collect the data on his own but was stonewalled in his attempts to connect with companies that could provide customer lists.

That led the Ole Miss professor to trudge out to Las Vegas (not a bad destination if you have to trudge) and pitched his idea to the Fantasy Sports Trade Association (then known as the Fantasy Sports Players Association). He offered to match the group’s funding through the first three years of a research project in return for the FSTA encouraging its members to supply consumer targets for the research. A partnership was born.

From the first study in 2002 and 2003, Beason’s pursuit of learning more about those who play fantasy sports quickly grew into popular and valuable research on the fantasy market and the consumer-spending habits of participants. Businesses used the data to court advertisers and more effectively target consumers. Media outlets latched onto the numbers to reflect the growth in this particular entertainment industry. Perhaps most importantly, the study’s valuable findings have driven up inquiries from FSTA constituents, which has in turn enhanced the breadth and depth of the information collected.

“Dr. Beason is the godfather of fantasy sports market research,” says Jeff Thomas, president of the FSTA and CEO of SportsBuff.com, which owns this site. “He took a chance on our small association many years ago, funded many of his own expenses to help kick off our research efforts and is now recognized as the top fantasy sports consumer behavior expert in the world.”

The project grew to the point that in 2006, Beason founded Fantasy Sport Research Specialists LLC “to serve as a clearinghouse for research,” an enterprise he shares with three partners. Although the annual FSTA study - whose sixth set of annual results were presented at the FSTA conference in Chicago on July 8 and 9 - is the company’s primary focus, there are other considerations as well.

“We also explore fantasy sport as a medium to teach children, relationships and differences between the fantasy sports and gaming industries, and fantasy sport in the workplace,” Beason says. “FSRS also conduct specialty-market, branding and product-development research for individual fantasy sport companies.”

Not surprisingly, all of this work stemmed from a career as a fantasy-sports player that began in 1989 with a keeper football league at Ole Miss. Beason quickly learned in his second season not to mix business too closely with pleasure, however, when hosting the league’s draft in a campus classroom nearly got him fired.

“My butt was in a sling for about 2 weeks,” he says. “I had to convince them (they were still skeptical) that what we did wasn’t gambling but a game of skill, and the league fees - 30 bucks - was given to the winner.  I ended up hanging on to my job by promising to never, ever, conduct another fantasy sport event on campus.”

Then again, one might argue that the lesson didn’t really take root.

“Heck, I play and research fantasy sport as a (small) part of my job!” Beason says. “Talk about fortunate.”

A roundup of recent posts on the FSB News page:

– Sporting News is working with go2 media to bring its content to mobile-phone users.

– Here’s a profile of Sportgenic, which seeks to “monetize sports sites.”

– Marketers understand that the fantasy sports consumer is someone worth targeting.

– The rapid growth of fantasy sports has been aided by advancing technology.

– In case you’re wondering what primary American sports leagues are doing in the way of online video streaming, here’s a summary.