Originally born as FSDashboard, Screaming Sports just recently went offline as it appears that the site is officially dead. The site was derelict for most of 2009 as the owners looked for a way to keep it alive. But it appears that Screaming Sports and FSDashboard are both completely gone now as the pages do not load, and Google’s cache copies cannot bring up any files hosted on Screaming Sports’ server. Screaming Sports burnt through $1.25M in funding that it received in July of 2007.
While it attempted to market itself as fantasy sports social network, the core problem with Screaming Sports’ business model is that it was built for the super-user. Screaming Sports was a useful tool if you managed fantasy teams on multiple fantasy sites, as it allowed you to manage them from one interface. The problem is that the amount of fantasy players that have a use or desire to use such a tool is a much smaller percentage of the fantasy market. At most, maybe 10,000 players would want to use such a tool.
Now, 10,000 users is nothing to scoff at it, and that few users could actually sustain a fantasy business. However, when you have full-time salaries to support and an investor who wants a return many times what it put in to the venture, Screaming Sports set itself up to fail. A concept like Screaming Sports could work if it was done as a side project and only funded once it already had that stable user base of 10,000 users.
The other issue with the site is that it scraped data from other fantasy sites in order to do such a thing. While most of the large fantasy sites did not seem to care, it was always a risk that could have crippled Screaming Sports at any point. Being dependent on someone else for the majority of your content is never good business in which to be.
Will you miss Screaming Sports?
2 Comments, Comment or Ping
Alain
very interesting analysis.
how did you come up with the number of 10,000 ?
Apr 22nd, 2010
Derrick Eckardt
Alain – the number 10,000 comes from my experience speaking to a number of the smaller sites that offer fantasy products. In most cases, around 10,000 active customers is where they found sustainable profitability and could actually afford to live off of the income that their site generated. Some of these sites are more successful than that with users in the 50,000 to 150,000 range, so there is definitely more upside and possibility for larger success. However, for products that appeal to a much smaller part of the fantasy audience, I would tend to be more conservative and use that 10,000 number as a guideline when building a business case.
In other words, if you can make a fantasy business work with 10,000 users, then you can have a sustainable operation. And in regards to this article, you cannot spend like you have 10,000 users until you have 10,000 users.
Apr 27th, 2010
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