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

Speaker 2: No. I don't think I ever watched. Is it worth watching?

Speaker 1: No. But you should watch the movie The Apprentice.

Speaker 2: I have seen that.

Speaker 1: That's a fantastic

Speaker 2: told me to watch that. Yeah. It's great movie.

Speaker 1: Great movie. And I think that that that that just about does the job. Anyway, we have our first guest, Ryan Spoon from Yahoo here with us live in the TBPN UltraDome. Get this button ready. We can't You want open this Jordy?

Speaker 4: Honorable. Yeah. Well, thank

Speaker 1: you so much for coming on down. How are you doing? This is awesome. Thank

Speaker 4: you. And super to be here.

Speaker 1: Please introduce yourself for everyone.

Speaker 4: Ryan Spoon. I'm president of Yahoo Media Group Yeah. Which includes Yahoo Finance Yeah. Yahoo Sports and some of our video efforts.

Speaker 1: How do you wind up in this role?

Speaker 4: I have spent

Speaker 1: a lot It's a good the yodel. The yodel. The yodel. And so this is They never die.

Speaker 4: And so this is we'll talk about sports and today's obviously important day for Fantasy but this is our Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Fantasy.

Speaker 1: Woah. There we go. Here. That's great.

Speaker 4: I love So this was started by Okay. The gentleman who who founded StockX has a company called Ghostwrite and we made these for our talent. And our Yeah. And there's a 100 of those in the world.

Speaker 1: You Yeah.

Speaker 4: You are now one of those.

Speaker 1: So Incredible. I mean I love it.

Speaker 2: Does does Yahoo have a long history of like deal toy type objects between the button and now this? Or is this

Speaker 4: They are related but unrelated. The we we try to create a bunch of things for different parts of the community. In Fantasy, we have 10,000,000 plus people who play Fantasy. We have a bunch of subscribers and so we've created a bunch of merch, chotch to to send to those fans. And then we got, you know, we do sixty hours of live shows a week at this point, just sports. Wow. And we want Crazy. We don't have this, but we want the backgrounds and and so forth.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. How cyclical is the business around sports? I mean, you mentioned like it's a big day. Break down what's happening now, the big moments on the calendar.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Football is king. Yeah. And we have a heritage around fantasy in particular. Mhmm. And obviously, fantasy is biggest around football. So there is cyclicality there.

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 4: But sports is now almost three hundred sixty five days. Mhmm. On the obviously, you had the World Cup in July, you had the Knicks and the Spurs in June. But starting September, and we're thirty days out now Mhmm. Of NFL kickoff Mhmm. Fantasy for us is really really critical. Those users are using the app Mhmm. Five out of seven days a week, almost two hours a week. And there's something I bet

Speaker 2: the winners are using it quite a bit more. I don't know what what they're doing taking a couple days off a week.

Speaker 4: We give them lots of research, lots of videos to consume, draft guides. But at this point now, there's sports to consume hours a day Mhmm. Every day. And it really is three hundred sixty five days a year.

Speaker 1: What do you what do you fantasy sports users want on the product side, on the feature side? Because obviously, there's a way that you, you know, stuff AI in every single piece of the UI. It can get a little bit over the top. At the same time, people can go to any AI app of their choosing and sort of ask the same questions and they get that for free. It's less work for you guys, but there's probably some pull there on or some tension there for you.

Speaker 4: It's really an interesting question because you could make it so that you press one button. Yeah. And that's not very fun.

Speaker 1: No. Yeah. It's like chess.com if it's like I get to play a stock fish like okay.

Speaker 4: And the beauty of fantasy is you have 12 friends or whatever your number is and you're chatting and you're going back and forth.

Speaker 3: Yep.

Speaker 4: And that there's a rhythm to it. This is the great part about Fantasy in particular is I can tell you what users do Monday, Tuesday. It's different Wednesday. It's different Thursday. And so we want the tool set to be easy. Yeah. We want it to make you feel smart or smarter. Yeah. But at the end of the day, we want you to be in control.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 4: The other part, our big learning has been, let's just create different formats. Create different ways to play. Okay. So last year we introduced something called death leagues with liquid death. Okay. It was a lot of fun. It's a very different way to play. Your goal

Speaker 2: Is it what it sounds like?

Speaker 4: Somewhat. Goal is to not get last every week.

Speaker 1: Okay. You get last, you're kicked out. Eliminated fully. Eliminated. And all those players

Speaker 4: go back

Speaker 1: to better because a lot of times someone comes in last two times and then they're not even updating their roster and then everyone's sort of picking over it. Right?

Speaker 4: And the strategy is when that person is kicked out, their players go to the waivers.

Speaker 1: Yep.

Speaker 4: So how do you use your budget? Yep. How do you figure out Interesting. Two weeks ago we announced college football fantasy. Yeah. And that is

Speaker 1: That hasn't existed? That feels like

Speaker 4: And it's awesome.

Speaker 1: Or is that is that on the back of NIL stuff or was this just like a technical

Speaker 2: Yeah. Why why so?

Speaker 4: Think there's a bunch of things all happening at the same time. Yeah. Of all, college is never bigger.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 4: The conferences are realigned and now Sure. Quite large.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 4: And so we created a game that has the power four conferences and Notre Dame.

Speaker 1: Okay.

Speaker 4: And we created a couple different formats for it. So there is also a team offensive flex. So if you are a big UT fan, you can draft Archmanning and Texas. Texas. Okay. But there are some twists that we need to because it is different than NFL.

Speaker 1: Sure. Sure. Sure.

Speaker 4: It's been really really fun so far.

Speaker 1: What is the the the structure of the revenue base for Yahoo Fantasy?

Speaker 4: Similar to Yahoo Sports Mhmm. Which is we are consumption and ad based. Ad based? Predominantly.

Speaker 1: Okay.

Speaker 4: But there are subscription products.

Speaker 1: There's subscription.

Speaker 4: And I would say this is true of how we treat Yahoo Finance.

Speaker 1: And then there's paid partnerships like the Liquid Death thing

Speaker 2: Yeah. That's sponsorship.

Speaker 4: We have lots of sponsorship. That's sponsorship. So you And you'll see that the same way you do a great job with the reads and integration and onset. We do that across all of our shows Okay.

Speaker 5: All of our apps.

Speaker 4: Yep. But then there are premium subscriptions.

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 4: We have a Yahoo Fantasy Plus product which has different data, different insights and features for Fantasy. Mhmm. We do the same on finance as well.

Speaker 1: What is the shape of if everyone in a Fantasy League is putting a $100 in, the winner takes it all, is there a way that Yahoo facilitates that, takes a cut or is all of this off book because of the way it is regulated?

Speaker 4: All the above. Okay. We have public leagues. Yeah. We have private leagues which are 12 friends or whatnot. Sure. Based on your states, we have the ability to play paid leagues.

Speaker 1: Oh, sure.

Speaker 4: And that's a lot of fun. Those are very engaged leagues, very active. Yeah. And then we do have the way to kind of manage your league. Yeah. What we don't do is we stick to fantasy.

Speaker 1: Sure.

Speaker 4: So we're not in the sports gaming, sports gambling.

Speaker 1: Yeah. That makes sense. Have you thought about setting up regional SAT testing facilities Uh-huh. For fantasy football punishments? So if I lose, I can go to a Yahoo brand

Speaker 4: I saw someone.

Speaker 1: I saw SAT testing facility and I can send Tyler over there to take the SAT. No. That's my favorite fantasy.

Speaker 4: The the crew in the front was telling me some of the highs of of their wins and also some of the punishments.

Speaker 1: Yeah. The punishments.

Speaker 4: And the SAT sounds positive in comparison.

Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. I'm sure. I'm sure. It's like a family friendly one. Sorry.

Speaker 2: How do you think about new sports leagues? We've had people on the show. Our friend Alexis is like a big investor in like a in an all women's track running league. We had

Speaker 1: the Slam enhanced ball? Or was he just talking about slam ball being cool?

Speaker 2: Yeah. Don't know. I don't know. Don't see it being fun. But then, you know, we had the the I think one of the founders of the enhanced games Oh, yeah. We covered that. But Yep. What's your outlook? Like at what point does something become do you care about emerging We do. Sports and leagues?

Speaker 4: We do. Look, it's great to be the NFL

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 4: To be NBA, MLB. But you exemplify this as as well as anyone, which is you find your audience

Speaker 1: Yeah. Niches.

Speaker 4: And you grow. Yeah. And there's never been a better time to be able to do that both for the rights holder, the league, and also the athletes. Mhmm. There's some really fascinating stuff. Alexis is involved in a lot of it. There's also TGL, the indoor Yeah. Golf league. Oh, really? It's awesome. Sean White has a snowboard

Speaker 2: league. Slam ball was Gary V, by the way.

Speaker 1: Oh, that's right. Okay.

Speaker 4: Got it. Gary's also in pickleball.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Pickleball.

Speaker 4: There's a lot of emerging sport.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 4: And part of the reason is the athletes have huge audiences and followings, no different than you have your own audiences and following. Mhmm. And then you're able to construct and to go live. And we, in many cases, there's the indoor football league had its semi finals last night. It's not the NFL

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 4: But they broadcast on Yahoo. And there's 5,000,000 people who've watched that season Mhmm. On Yahoo. So there's tons of examples of people starting up new new product, if you will.

Speaker 2: How do you you're doing sixty hours a week of live content?

Speaker 4: And forty, fifty in finance.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely mogging us. We're only we're barely putting up 15. Right. How do you Two people do it. How do you how do you identify talent? How confident are you when you're looking at signing or helping create a show? How confident, like how refined is your kind of forecasting ability to understand if somebody's gonna be be great?

Speaker 4: I would love to say it's super refined. The look. The the way the way we've done everything is and I say it's the same North Star just said differently for sports and finance, which is our aim is to deliver smart content, make you a smarter fan, make you a smarter investor. Starts with that. We know what our priorities are. We have to be great in fantasy. Mhmm. And hands down, we have the best fantasy roster. And then sport by sport or category by category, whether it's crypto or it's Magcept. We need voices tied to those. Sure. In general, we are looking for people who are multi platform. Mhmm. So we want, you know, just like you, some days I listen on pods, some days I listen on video. Sure. It's a skill set to be able to do both of those well as the talent side.

Speaker 1: Yep.

Speaker 4: Yep. That's important. A lot of our folks are also writers. Mhmm. And they also have followings on social. Sure. Most importantly, and I and I, again, think you guys are excellent at this, you just have to have fun. Yeah. And you can see it when you hear Kevin O'Connor

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 4: On NBA. You can see it Brian Sasi on finance. They just are happy. Yeah. And they enjoy their job and they're smiling.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 4: And that is you can learn you can't learn that. You either have that energy or you don't.

Speaker 1: How are you thinking about shared distribution infrastructure? Like, we've done a lot to clip the show and repurpose it for LinkedIn and Instagram. And when you have a lot of content, it can sometimes be Yep. Overwhelming to have duplication across all your hosts and all your different shows. But it might be better if one of those one of those talented hosts is sharing clips on their own personal Instagram, for example. But then, where's the value accrue to Yahoo or not? And so there's this like tension there, but I'm wondering how you've how you've sorted through that over the time.

Speaker 4: So I don't think that's attention. Okay. I think it's a reality. Yeah. Yeah. And you got to accept it.

Speaker 1: Sure. Sure.

Speaker 4: And I spent a lot of years at ESPN. I spent Yeah. Almost eight years at ESPN.

Speaker 1: I'm sure you saw it with like Twitter, like, and ESPN at that time where it was like, oh, wow. Like this person's getting really big just for taking a picture or sending out a 140 characters.

Speaker 4: So we have a gentleman named Ariel Helwani. Yeah. And if you know MMA or UFC, he is the voice. Yeah. And he's awesome. He's he's got he's got a beautiful studio.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. We looked at his studio. I was studying his studio setup early on because he does a lot of remote guests. Sure. And it's he has an interesting setup to make it feel like it conversation but also the viewer can

Speaker 4: And it's similar in the sense that he does with his crew. Mhmm. They do a period every they go live three hours every day. Sounds familiar?

Speaker 1: Yep.

Speaker 4: They have a period. Tiring.

Speaker 1: But it works.

Speaker 4: It works. Yeah. And then they have a lot of guests. And a lot of those guests come on video. A lot of those guests are live in person.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 4: For his audience, for him and and for his team and his brand to do the the sharing on social is more impactful. We obviously still amplify it Sure. And Yad will

Speaker 1: do it

Speaker 4: and we have our but that's a good thing. Yeah. Yeah. Same as Brian Sassy, super active on LinkedIn. That's a good thing.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 4: Better than and he can say things and relate to his audience in a way that is more impactful Mhmm. Doing that than it would be from a brand.

Speaker 1: Mhmm. What's been how do you process the prediction market boom? Huge demand from sports fans broadly. Even just when I'm watching the World Cup, I wanna even though I'm not a better eye or trader, I Predictor. Predictor. I like to just have a clear number. Yep. Like, oh, okay. 20% chance that America wins this or whatever. It's an easy way to understand a line and and what experts are thinking. At the same time, complicated from a regulatory perspective, how have you experienced the the boom? How have you Yeah. Decided to integrate or not?

Speaker 4: So you raised two very important, but I think separated points. Mhmm. The first, and I've I said this before the space kinda opened up on the sports betting side. Whether you bet or predict or not, I think it's actually really important to the storytelling Yeah. For the reason you just outlined.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 4: It's a very easy way to digest what is likely to happen.

Speaker 1: Yep.

Speaker 4: If you can actually then overlay the live odds Yeah. Or predictions on top of a game Yeah. Or an event and start to understand things very interesting. The same way you can take a stock price and say, oh, there's earnings. Yeah. There's news. Totally. So I think it's actually really important that we do it and we do it right and safely from a storytelling perspective. On the our role there is a little different. Obviously, we do the storytelling. We're not gonna process or or be actively the platform. Mhmm. But we have a very big audience, a 100,000,000 plus users in in sports, a 100,000,000 plus people Here you go. A 100,000,000 plus in finance. Our job is to work with those platforms.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 4: And so we've worked with Polymarket. Yeah. Kalshi, we talked about Ariel Helwani and Uncrowned. Kalshi provides all the

Speaker 3: Oh, yeah.

Speaker 4: They vertically have that. Mhmm. You see odds from other platforms. Mhmm. We think that's really important, but we're gonna do that in an integration and a partnership and a sponsorship way.

Speaker 1: Mhmm. What's driving top of funnel? I mean, a 100,000,000 is a ton. There's a lot of people. I imagine you want to grow. What's the

Speaker 4: We do want to grow.

Speaker 1: For getting to 500,000,000?

Speaker 4: 5 hundred's a lot.

Speaker 1: What's the plan to get to 5,000,000,000? More sports sports fans. Need those Leo was Markzahlberg. Like was like, we need to put internet in Africa if we're going to get No.

Speaker 2: No. An example like like you're you're somewhat the best marketing for Yahoo is is probably like the league's doing well. They're being like riveting storylines. And it is an it has been interesting. The UFC has had a couple big moments this year, but the league has like, from my point of view, and again, I'm I'm a casual, but from my point of view, the league has somewhat struggle struggled to cultivate American superstars or or or western superstars, which is where a lot of the the you know, which is important for the league overall. And so, yeah, it's this interesting dynamic where, like, how much you can only do so much without these big moments happening. You have to be ready for those big moments.

Speaker 4: And it's it's interesting. The we want to drive fandom.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 4: And we don't play in the live rights. You know, we're not licensing. That's a very different game. We play a different game than ESPN. But all of us benefit from fandom generally growing. Mhmm. And so while the UFC bout will not occur on Yahoo, the pregame, the postgame. We wanna be the game around the game, the discussion around and drive the fandom. I'll give you a slight pivot on the how do we grow.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Sure.

Speaker 4: And yes, we do wanna grow and yes, we are growing.

Speaker 1: Of course.

Speaker 4: I actually spend more time thinking about usage. Sure. And one of the takeaways from being at a TV world was priority number one is grow minutes, which is a very kind of TV term, but we look at overall consumption in minutes. Mhmm. And there's two ways to grow that. Get new people coming in

Speaker 1: Yep.

Speaker 4: And get them to do more things.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 4: And that's why things like fantasy are so important is we introduced college football. It's been very good so far. Mhmm. A third of those users have never played on Yahoo. Mhmm. A third of the people who play death leagues have never played on Yahoo. New formats adding top of the funnel, but we know that when those users come, they're habitually there. Mhmm. I don't know how you go from a 100 to 500, but I I do have a sense of how you go from get you to spend ten minutes today to get you to spend 12.

Speaker 1: Fantasy movie league. That's what you gotta do. I played this unironically. It was not on Yahoo. Was on some random website. You have a you have eight screens. You get to pick. Okay. I want the Odyssey. That's really expensive. A box office. Yeah. You box office. You create a theoretical box office. Then when the numbers come in, you see who ranks. I got all my friends playing for like one season. But the season doesn't really end because there's always movies and it's yearly. But people have a lot of fun with that. The niche

Speaker 2: Yeah. I always I always wish there was Fantasy

Speaker 1: is so fun.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Wish there was Fantasy private markets. Yeah. But but one of the challenges when I think one of the challenges is like attention spans. Like there's companies right now that I just know are like obvious shorts. Yeah. And I would love to express that.

Speaker 1: For a decade. Like realistic.

Speaker 2: Hang out for it'll be it's like Yeah. Like this and then just bam. Yeah. But yeah, I don't even want to do it publicly but just with like, you know, just for fun with like a group chat

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: It sounds incredible but I just don't think the don't know if the attention spans are there because sometimes a company like is actively failing Yeah. But will take

Speaker 1: A long time. Long time.

Speaker 4: Don't know to answer that part. But but connected to the one of the how do you get more time, you have to satisfy different ways of play, which could be what we just talked about. But also, I want something to play today

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 4: Versus a season Totally. Versus

Speaker 1: perpetuity of the box office. Yeah.

Speaker 4: Just been

Speaker 2: around forever.

Speaker 4: But we have different formats for different things. So we had a World Cup game with Fox. Sure. Obviously, the broadcast. Yeah. We have daily games which we've done for WNBA Yeah. We've done for f one. And that's a way to watch a game, make some make some predictions. And then you can play within a week, but really it's consumed in a single day. Mhmm. And then you have the whole NFL season or MLB season is a commitment.

Speaker 1: And there's enough overlap there that true sports fans Yeah. Must have something. Yeah. For sure. For sure. Well, thank you so much for coming on.

Speaker 4: Thank you so much.

Speaker 2: Justin, thank you for the gift.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. We appreciate it.

Speaker 2: Need to make

Speaker 1: some of those or sell them. Thank to see