Yahoo Fantasy launches college football leagues and death leagues as it pushes toward 100M+ sports users

Yahoo Fantasy's growth playbook: new formats, 100M+ users, prediction market partnerships

Ryan Spoon runs Yahoo Media Group, overseeing Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance, and the company's expanding live video operation. His argument is that the path from 100 million sports users to sustained growth runs through usage depth, not just user acquisition — and that new fantasy formats are the primary lever.

New formats as top-of-funnel

Yahoo launched two new fantasy products recently. Death leagues, built with Liquid Death as a sponsor, eliminate the last-place finisher each week, with that player's roster returning to waivers. A third of death league players had never played on Yahoo before.

College football fantasy launched two weeks ago, covering the Power Four conferences plus Notre Dame. It includes a team offensive flex option, letting fans draft a quarterback and his school together — so a Texas fan can pick Arch Manning alongside Texas. A third of those users are also new to Yahoo.

The pattern is deliberate. New formats pull in new users, and those users tend to be habitual: fantasy players open the app five out of seven days a week and spend close to two hours in it weekly.

“We are doing sixty hours of live shows a week at this point, just sports... In Fantasy, we have 10,000,000 plus people who play Fantasy... Two weeks ago we announced college football fantasy — a third of those users have never played on Yahoo. A third of the people who play death leagues have never played on Yahoo. New formats adding top of the funnel.”

Revenue model

The business is primarily ad-supported, with sponsorship integrations layered across shows and apps. Yahoo Fantasy Plus is a premium subscription tier offering additional data, insights, and features. Paid leagues are available in eligible states, where users can manage prize pools. Yahoo does not process sports gambling and draws a firm line between fantasy and sports betting.

Prediction markets

Yahoo has partnered with Polymarket and Kalshi rather than building its own prediction infrastructure. Spoon frames live odds and prediction data as a storytelling tool — a way for casual fans to quickly understand probability during a game, the same way a stock price contextualizes earnings news. Yahoo distributes the data and takes a sponsorship or integration fee; the platforms handle the mechanics.

Ariel Helwani's MMA show on Yahoo uses Kalshi for odds integration. The arrangement is representative of how Yahoo approaches the space: audience and editorial reach in exchange for partnership revenue, without regulatory exposure.

Live content scale

Yahoo produces roughly 60 hours of live sports content per week and 40 to 50 hours in finance. Spoon's talent criteria centers on multiplatform versatility, social following, and genuine enthusiasm — the last of which he says cannot be taught. On distribution, he treats talent-owned social amplification as a feature rather than a threat, arguing that a host like Brian Sassy reaching his finance audience directly on LinkedIn is more effective than the Yahoo brand doing it.

Growth target

Spoon's near-term focus is on increasing consumption per user — moving someone from 10 minutes a day to 12 — rather than racing to a headline user number. College football fantasy and death leagues are the current vehicles. Yahoo is also running daily fantasy formats tied to single events, including WNBA games and Formula 1 races, to capture users who won't commit to a full season.

The indoor football league broadcast on Yahoo drew 5 million viewers across the season — a data point Spoon uses to argue that emerging sports can find real audiences outside the major leagues.