Yahoo is beefing up its popular Sports and Fantasy offerings with new cross-app capabilities that tap into the booming collectibles market, its increasingly social-driven context, and e-commerce around all of it.
The free, ad-supported additions are called Milestones, Shop, and Profile, and are designed to appeal to a broad range of sports fans, from the casual to committed, said Andrew Machado, Yahoo Sports’ vice president of product design and engineering.
“We have 100 million visitors a month to Yahoo Sports,” Machado said in an interview. “They’re very different. There are different levels of fandom. How do we pay off those different kinds of fans?”
The sports-collectible space has boomed in recent years, as exemplified by Fanatics, which started as a place to buy team gear and has blossomed into a billion-dollar, full-fledged media and commerce company and owner of the Topps trading-card company.
The growing social aspect of collectibles got a big boost earlier this month when a South Carolina man participating in a live online event through the Rhode Island-based RhodyBreakers purchased a box of NBA cards that were “pulled” in a live online event.
Jason Williams’ $515 purchase turned into a massive payday, a one-of-one card for the Dallas Mavericks’ Rookie of the Year winner, Cooper Flagg, valued at $5 million. Williams subsequently joined CNBC to talk about the experience:
Yahoo is taking a different approach from Topps and RhodyBreakers, creating in-the-moment, in-app digital “cards” commemorating milestones big and small, from a Seattle Mariners pitcher moving up his team’s career strikeouts ladder to Stephon Curry breaking a league three-point mark, and much, much else.
Examples of Milestones, Yahoo Sports’ new digital collectibles awarded to fans watching when a notable sports achievement happens
(Image courtesy of Yahoo Sports)
People who are watching the landmark as it is achieved, and have the Yahoo Sports mobile or browser app tracking the match, will receive a digital “card” marking the moment, with a grade between 1 and 5 for the moment’s rarity, notability, and how many people witnessed it.
Users can cash in less-prized collectibles in exchange for the site’s in-app currency, called points, which in turn can be redeemed for a wide array of digital assets to dress up their profiles and online presence, such as avatars created by notable street-culture designers such as DJ Skee.
“It’s sort of our own thing,” Machado said. “We’re trying to make it unique to us. The collectibles aspect is more proof you were there” when something big happened in a game.
Building your collection of Milestones among other efforts to be a better, bigger fan of a given team helps increase the site’s rating of a participant’s fandom. The goal, for the most obsessed, is to make it into a given team’s top 1 percent.
The new profiles help bring together all the things, including Fantasy, that a fan takes part in, and become a key component of the social aspects of the latest additions. Fans can use their accumulated points to buy further enhancements to their profile, like flames.
To start, the new services will track Major League Baseball, the NFL and college football, for which Yahoo also just launched a Fantasy component. Machado said Yahoo plans to roll out similar fandom offerings for other sports as they come into season, including the NBA and NHL. All told, perhaps 10 U.S. leagues or sports will be part of the offerings under current plans.
Some sports probably won’t become part of the new offerings, however.
Machado said, for instance, that he’s a big fan of combat sport UFC, but, “Some of these sports that are a little more unstructured are harder to take advantage of. We’re trying to build a system on statistics that are understood by people.”
Despite Yahoo Sports’ hugely popular Fantasy operation, however, the latest additions are not designed with gamblers in mind. Gamblers, Machado said “have an insatiable appetite for data” as they gather any information, and possible advantage, they can in making their bets on a given matchup.
Yahoo Sports and Fantasy provide plenty of data already. But gamblers’ interest in a specific game, or even a specific player’s achievements, tends to revolve around a given transaction more than a given team.
That’s a very different motivation than what engages a team’s ardent followers, which means gamblers typically won’t have the same fandom connections and deeper engagement that Milestones, Profiles and Shop are trying to feed, Machado said.
“This product is more Kevin Costner-Kelly Preston (stars of 1999 baseball movie For Love of the Game) than for those folks,” Machado said.
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