The whole fantasy sports industry has been reaching out to a younger audience for the past few years, but Sports Illustrated is going younger than most.

SI Digital has reached a two-year deal with old favorite gaming company Strat-O-Matic to design fantasy games for a teen and pre-teen audience under the SIKids.com umbrella. Specifically, the 12 new games will be targeting 8- to 15-year-olds.

“We’re going after something that speaks more directly to this audience,” SI Kids managing editor Bob Der told Sports Business Journal. “We look at this as the most passionate time in one’s sports fandom, and there’s a definite thirst we see for a better fantasy experience for this age group.”

The effort will start with a salary-cap baseball game that was supposed to be available by Wednesday but wasn’t as of that night. The site’s fantasy page says that football, basketball and hockey will also be available by the end of the year. In addition, SIKids.com appears ready to jump into the burgeoning areas of fantasy college football and college basketball.

The games will, of course, be free to play. According to the SBJ report, SIKids.com boasted 250,000 registered fantasy users in 2008, when STATS ran the games.

Fantasy Sports Ventures has bought a piece of Sports Reference LLC, the company that runs Baseball-Reference.com and other popular sports information sites.

According to the Sports Business Journal report, FSV “paid a low seven-figure sum” for the stake, raising to 15 the number of sites in its Fantasy Players Network in which FSV owns a stake. The network — of which Sports Reference was already part — comprises 370 sites in all. The group of 15 reportedly account for about 25 percent of the network’s total traffic.

“This was a very unique asset where we had the desire and saw an opportunity to get involved at a much deeper level,” said FSV chief executive Chris Russo told SBJ. “We think we can help them grow and continue to build scale. We also hope to use this relationship and build some custom market opportunities for advertisers within the Sports Reference group of sites.”

Sports Reference started in April 2000 with the launch of Baseball-Reference.com by then college math professor Sean Forman. Pro-Football-Reference.com came online in December of that year through the work of fellow math professor Doug Drinen. In April 2004, statistics professor Justin Kubatko launched Basketball-Reference.com, and the three combined under the Sports Reference heading in October of that year.

Two years later, Forman quit teaching to go full time with Sports Reference, which also encompasses Hockey-Reference.com and an Olympics site. Forman told SBJ that the FSV investment will allow the company to go even further.

“We have a number of new areas we’re looking to get into,” Forman said. “We’ve basically been in the big four sports and Olympics, so this investment gives the capital to go pursue that.”

Most significantly, Sports Reference plans to enter the realm of college athletics, a potentially daunting task because of the abundance of teams but also a potential traffic bonanza thanks to the rabidity of college fan bases. The emerging market for fantasy college sports certainly won’t hurt things on that front either.

SBJ reports that Sports Reference’s group of sites already garner about a million unique page views a month, about a tenth of the total unique views for the Fantasy Players Network according to comScore’s December stats.

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.

In a brief segment from a show on the YES Network, Forbes national editor Michael Ozanian speaks about the growing fantasy sports market and how favorable the consumers are who make it up.

Honestly, if you follow the fantasy sports market research as we do here at FSB.com, this video probably won’t tell you anything new. When the folks near the top of the American financial food chain realize and report on the strength of our industry, though, it’s worth passing along.

The “Fantasy Sports Hit Mainstream” video below the featured clip features Rotoworld’s Gregg Rosenthal and Rick Cordella — along with Eric Fisher of the Sports Business Journal — talking about just what the title says. Rosenthal, for one, thinks that we’ve only seen the very beginning of fantasy’s integration into the mainstream and that plenty more awaits.