Yahoo has been trying some subscription content approaches lately, especially with Yahoo Finance Premium, and now they’re bringing that idea to their fantasy sports content. The company announced Tuesday that they’re launching Yahoo Fantasy Plus, a subscription product which will offer a lot of stats-based features and some exclusive insights. Here’s more from a release:
Yahoo Fantasy Plus, a brand new premium subscription product, will give users access to advanced research tools, trade insights, easier lineup management, advanced stats and more for all season-long fantasy games. Yahoo Fantasy Plus will offer the following features and tools that enhance the fantasy experience and improve the user’s quality of play at launch, with additional features to rollout in the future:
Research Assistant: Quickly compare players with an easy-to-use interface and make informed decisions on who to sit/start and add/drop with the help of premium data & exclusive insights from Yahoo Fantasy Diamond level players.
Start Optimal Players: Upgrade the Start Active Players tool by making sure the best players are in your lineup each day or for the entire week with the click of a button
Trade Insights: Unlock strengths and weaknesses at every position for each team in the league to help facilitate trades.
Advanced Stats: Take player analysis to the next level by unlocking advanced statistics
The Fantasy Plus service is available now through Yahoo’s website or through the Yahoo Fantasy Sports app for $8 a year, which is listed as an introductory price. And there’s a seven-day free trial for all fantasy players, and they’re also giving out $5 in rewards points “for a limited time,” with those points available to be used to enter paid fantasy contests. There’s a fair bit of competition in the fantasy advice/tools space, including some paid options at the recently-rebranded NBC Sports Edge (formerly known as Rotoworld) and some options on ESPN+ (where many of ESPN’s articles and columnists have been moved, both in fantasy sports and in other areas), but Yahoo does have a long history in this space, and they have a lot of users who play fantasy games on their site, so there certainly would seem to be some audience for this.
The other fantasy feature Yahoo is rolling out is Draft Together, which builds on their “co-viewing product” Watch Together. They brought Watch Together to their NFL coverage last fall, so this is the next sports step for it. The idea here is to “enable multiple fans to uniquely experience and interact with each other through video chat as they draft their fantasy baseball team on yahoo.com/fantasybaseball and create a personalized community of friends and family.” For now, it’s available for live drafts and private leagues with 12 teams or less, and will offer support for 12 rotating video frames to be displayed alongside the Yahoo Fantasy draft interface for the 2021 fantasy baseball season.
As with the Fantasy Plus service, there are already lots of video chat service options out there (and many avid fantasy players have already been doing drafts with video chats through other applications). But there are some definite benefits to one that’s integrated with the draft site, and Yahoo’s fantasy offerings have a significant user base that may give this a try for their drafts. We’ll see how these new features work out for Yahoo.
[Yahoo! Fantasy logo via Yahoo]
