Saturday Interview: Making It To The Major League Of Fantasy Sports

Christopher J. Russo lives a life of fantasy in the real world.

Christopher J. Russo

He founded Fantasy Sports Ventures Inc. in 2006. Before that, he spent 15 years in the media business as the vice president for marketing at NBC, the executive vice president for franchise programming/marketing at New Line Cinema and in senior executive positions at the National Football League, where he was the senior vice president for new media-publishing from 1999 to 2005.

While at the N.F.L., Mr. Russo, who earned a master’s degree from the Harvard Business School in 1990, helped start the league’s first fantasy football game.

And while Rotisserie baseball is recognized as the granddaddy of all fantasy sports, football has emerged as the most popular fantasy sport among the 15 million Americans who spend hours massaging statistical data and picking teams. There are now 17 million unique users of fantasy football sites, compared with 3 million fantasy baseball players.

Mr. Russo scored a coup of sorts in the world of online fantasy games when Nielsen Online reported last November that fantasyplayers.com was the No. 4 site among fantasy football destinations, behind Yahoo, ESPN and CBS SportsLine, but ahead of NFL.com, FoxSports.com and SI.com. His company was No. 2 in fantasy baseball.

In addition to providing fantasy fields of dreams in mainstream sports, the site has fantasy games in tennis, cricket, ice hockey, basketball and soccer.

With more than 90 affiliated member sites providing content, the company has succeeded in attracting advertising from Wal-Mart, Sprint, EA Sports, AT&T and Topps.

Excerpts from the interview follow:

Q. Who plays fantasy sports and why do you believe those players are so appealing to advertisers?

A. The fantasy audience is highly engaged, it is composed mostly of men 18 to 49 who spend five to six hours a week managing their teams. They rank high in terms of education, income and their propensity to buy products. They are among some of the most engaged people on the Web. There are 18 million people playing fantasy sports in the United States.

Fantasy sports combines games, sports and community — three of the most powerful drivers on the Web, rolled into one. The users can be the general manager and select the players on their team, and what they’re looking for is information that no one else might have, or is not available on other sites. It empowers the fan and drives so much usage. That is what advertisers find appealing — these are not casual users.

Q. You mentioned the new Web buzzword: community. Do the sites on your network have anything in common with Facebook or MySpace?

A. In general terms, the users of community-based applications are highly engaged. In the last couple of years, the buzz has been about what’s the social networking application for sports — the killer app for sports. It really is fantasy sports. But it’s different from Facebook, which to me really is a community of 12, your friends from college. In fantasy sports, you’re playing together in a league, having fun, trash-talking.

And while Facebook and MySpace have added sports widgets, they are really about casual play. Quick hit games. The more avid sports fans are spending time on specialty sites on our games network.

Q. Why has football overtaken baseball, at least in terms of the number of fantasy players?

A. Baseball was the first fantasy sport and, next to football, has the most audience. But with baseball, you need to be on top of your teams and stats every day. It takes a higher level of commitment. Football is more weekly. Of course, there is a commitment in time, but with football it is more of a ritual leading up to games on Sunday. During the week, fans are looking for news on injuries and on Sunday, fans will spend time looking for last-minute news. Monday and Tuesday are post-mortem days. Really, fantasy games are a natural for football because of its natural rhythm during the week.

Q. Recent data from Nielsen Online shows that your company has cracked the top five fantasy football Web sites, putting you in the company of Yahoo, ESPN and CBS SportsLine. Is there something fans find on your site that they cannot find elsewhere?

A. Our competition is the bigger media sites, but we’re also complementary to those sites. People play fantasy games at those sites and then they tend to come to us for new, fresh information and analysis. A user may make 12 visits a week for fantasy football; seven to the main site and five to other sites to get new info. We have all those other sites. We have injury reports, in-depth reports on the N.F.L. draft. Our sites are by fantasy players for fantasy players.

We are a network portal site. We own six of the sites, including freefantasy.com, fantasyplayers.com and thehuddle.com, and have an integrated network of 95 affiliates for sports like baseball, basketball and football run by independent contractors and one or two entrepreneurs.

Q. Why do you think you can succeed as an advertiser-

supported environment when many Web sites are struggling to attract enough advertisers to turn a profit?

A. Topps, the company that makes baseball cards, is one of our advertisers. When they came to us and said they were interested in building some fantasy component into their rookie cards, which is one of their most successful lines, we provided the content on their Web site. We want to enable advertisers to wrap themselves in our content, into the unique content of 100 sites.

An extended version is available at nytimes.com/business.

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