A roundup of recent posts on the FSB News page.

– According to comScore’s numbers, Fantasy Sports Ventures’ Fantasy Players Network enjoyed the Web’s second-largest increase in unique visitors from November to December. The network welcomed 79 percent more such visitors in the final month of 2008.

– Pro Tour Fantasy Golf and Portable Golf Solutions have partnered up to allow charitable organizations to present fantasy golf competitions.

– Poochie Bennish answered those questions from his wife by winning the 2008 World Championship of Fantasy Football.

– CNET’s Don Reisinger spotlights four out-of-the-mainstream Web sources for the stat-obsessed fan: Sports Data Hub, SportsGenie, Sports Reference and StatSheet.

– SoCalTech.com interviews Jose daVeiga, co-founder and CEO of KlickSports. The company operates contests focused on in-game questions for fans to answer.

– Roto Times’ Brian Polking will take The Intimidator, Jeff Gordon, Ricky Rudd, Jeff Burton and … Fonty Flock?

A roundup of recent posts on the FSB News page.

– Roto Times’ Brian Polking (about as good a last name as a NASCAR writer could hope for) writes that the economic downturn and subsequent strain on sponsorships in NASCAR is making for a tougher season in fantasy auto racing leagues.

– Kevin Orris of Fantasy Pros 911 wants to hear your fantasy baseball story.

– Sporting News has been working aggressively to minimize the impact on its business of print media’s marginalization.The most visible effort over the past year has been the creation of the daily e-mail newspaper, Sporting News Today, but the parent company is also stepping up e-mail campaigns and search engine optimization to drive consumers to its site.

– Tough to say for sure whether this is a ranking on Sports Business Journal’s site, but Eric Fisher’s list of digital sports media sectors being pitched to venture capital firms certainly seems to be. Checking in at No. 2 — right behind social media — is fantasy. It’d be nice to know if this is a list of the most popular, the most effective or both, but we know this: Fantasy is a major player these days.

Name: Nate Ravitz
Nickname: none
Job title(s): Deputy Editor, Fantasy, ESPN.com
Full-time in fantasy? Yes
Age: 31
Education: B.A. in English, University of Michigan
Family status: Married, no children
Favorite fantasy sport to play: Baseball
Favorite sport to watch: NFL
Favorite team (any sport): N.Y. Jets
All-time favorite athlete: Andre Agassi
Years playing fantasy: 11

I got my start in the fantasy industry when: I joined Total Quality Stats as a part-time sportswriter in 1998.

Since then, my fantasy résumé includes: Executive Director, Rototimes.com; Deputy Editor, Fantasy, ESPN.com

Before fantasy, I worked in: N/A

Three questions

1) What was the impetus for the creation of The Roto Times? What took you away from the company that you helped to start?

In mid-1999, my TQStats partners and I started talking about creating a standalone fantasy news and analysis site. We were already doing a lot of the work in the content area of the league manager site, writing player news, updating depth charts and providing a question and answer service. It was a natural move to present those features to a broader audience. As for my departure, it was time to move on and take on new challenges, and ESPN presents a lot of amazing opportunities.

2) Have the duties of your position at ESPN cut into the time you once spent on player evaluation and analysis? Is there anything you miss about previous fantasy gigs?

For the bulk of my career, player evaluation and analysis was the part of my job most visible to the audience, but it was never the whole job. A lot of it was building and managing a team and having a major voice in the broader business and direction of the organization. My role at ESPN is very similar, but with it being a much bigger operation and being a true cross-platform media company, there’s a lot more to do in the “behind-the-scenes” category. I still like discussing and analyzing players, and fortunately, the Fantasy Focus podcasts give me an outlet to do that. As for anything I miss, probably just the people. You can’t work the better part of a decade with a group of people without making some lasting friendships.

3) How have you seen fantasy content and the industry landscape in general change with the adoption of fantasy sports by mainstream media?

Mainstream media coverage is just one part of fantasy sports’ evolution into a mainstream property. We’re now seeing a generation of new players coming into the hobby because their parents played, and that’s very cool. Mainstream media coverage has helped fight the stigma that fantasy is a niche hobby for stat geeks (although I think there’s still more that can be done).

Last March when we did the Baseball Tonight Fantasy Draft special, and you had Matthew Berry and Eric Karabell sitting next to Karl Ravech and Buster Olney … that tells you that fantasy content is ready for prime time. Acceptance of fantasy has been like a snowball effect. Once it started rolling down the hill, it picked up speed and kept expanding. Cris Carter is on Fantasy Football Now every week giving his picks for Streak for the Cash. Darren McFadden, Lance Moore and Tim Hightower were on our podcast this year. We now have pro athletes (active and retired) actively seeking ways to be more involved in fantasy because they recognize the opportunity for exposure. And — whether you agree with the approach or not — the idea that someone like Lori Loughlin (Aunt Becky from Full House) would be a guest on a fantasy podcast would have been unheard of three years ago. With the mainstream acceptance has come new business opportunities.

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.