Business Profile: Fanball
Monday, October 6th, 2008
Company: Fanball
Launched: 1993
Site: www.fanball.com
Back in 1993, there wasn’t a whole lot in the way of fantasy advice on the market. Paul Charchian and Rob Phythian set out to change that.
“There was no information of any kind available once the season started,” Charchian told FSB.com. “We wanted to get something out there.”
Something was Fantasy Football Weekly, which hit Minneapolis newsstands and promptly outsold Sports Illustrated locally. The instant success quickly led an expansion of the business and in 1998, Fanball hit the Internet.
Unfortunately, the growth might have come a bit too quickly, as Fanball ran into serious trouble at the end of the decade and was forced to file for bankruptcy protection in 2000.
“We spent our money too fast, flamed out and filed Chapter 11 like others caught in the dot-com boom,” Phythian told the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune back in 2004. “Fortunately, we were saved by some angel investors.”
The group of investors included the original co-founders, and the group scaled down the plan a little bit and brought the company back around.
“There’s a real business here, albeit smaller than everyone else had been hoping for,” then-CEO John Ehlert told the Fantasy Sports Informant in 2002, “and with some resources and dedication to business basics we can grow it steadily rather than astronomically.”
The altered path worked out, and today Fanball.com is a comprehensive fantasy sports site — operating as part of FUN Technologies Inc. — that offers a variety of games and original content in six sports, namely baseball, football, basketball, hockey, golf and NASCAR.
“We feel we offer everything possible for both the casual and advanced fantasy consumer,” says Ryan Houston, Fanball’s senior vice president for business development and publisher. “We like to say ‘Play it all at Fanball,’ and that statement is completely accurate.”
Houston touts more than 50 games in the Fanball library, including league commissioner and draft-and-play offerings in each of the four traditional major sports, as well as “challenge games” in each of the six sports mentioned above. That area of the site was enhanced by the 2006 purchase of CDM Sports, which has been running games such as salary-cap contests since 1992, and its integration with Fanball under the umbrella of Fun Technologies.
“We are quite pleased with how quickly CDM was able to consolidate all the Fanball products into one property,” Houston tells FSB. “The strength of CDM was in-game play and development, and that continues today.”
The melding of Fanball and CDM created a single operation in St. Louis with about 50 staffers handling the game applications and churning out the fantasy content. Among the recent developments have been the platform for the Olympics quick-pick game presented by NBC Sports for the Games in August, a fantasy football application for the iPhone that launched at the beginning of the season and an expansion of Owner’s Edge (Fanball’s proprietary service that offers fantasy news, information and advice). The company’s holdings also include TQ Stats, Roto Times and FantasyCup.com, and Houston says that there is interest in adding to the portfolio.
“The recent launch of our first iPhone application and fantasy video segment gives you a glimmer of what our technology group is capable of producing, and we look forward to the challenges, innovation and growth that are ahead,” he says.
