Similar to last week’s readings, Randle and Nyland focused
their attention on fantasy sports and user participation. Randle and Nyland
paid particular attention to how fantasy sports players consume different forms
of media, not just television. Their ultimate goal was to look at the
relationship fantasy sports players had with sports mass media as a whole and
how fantasy sports might be a factor in this relationship.
The article first establishes the demographic of fantasy
sports. Although the article states that many people considers themselves to be
sports fans, fantasy sports typically caters to an audience of males between
the ages of 18-34 year olds. Like last week’s readings point out, the fantasy
sports world is a huge market, bringing in well over $1 billion in advertising
and subscription fees alone. This large market gave Randle and Nyland a reason
to examine the relationship between fantasy sports and mass media consumption,
as the demand for fantasy sports and news relating to fantasy sports is
incredibly high in today’s market.
In their study, Randle and Nyland examine the relationship
between fantasy sports and media consumption in a few different ways. They
ultimately settle on five different relationships: (1) fantasy sports participation
and watching highlights, (2) checking fantasy sports scores and watching
highlights, (3) fantasy sports participation and sports media consumption other
than the internet, (4) actual sports participation and fantasy sports
participation, and (5) time on internet and fantasy sports participation.
In examining these relationships, Randle and Nyland were
able to support most of their hypotheses. There was a correlation between all
relationships except for one: sports participation and fantasy sports
participation. Although all other hypotheses supported a relationship between
fantasy sports and their respective variables, actual sports participation was
shown to not be an indicator of participation in fantasy sports.
The implications of this
study were an interesting conversation. The article stated that fantasy sports
seemed to act as a “catalyst to increase interest in and likelihood of
attending real life games, reading sports material, memorizing sports trivia
and statistics, and being caught up (to the exclusion of other activities) in
the world of sports.” While this may seem
like an obvious conclusion, it goes to show just how impactful fantasy sports
are – and can be – in today’s market. Not only do fantasy sports currently
bring in a huge market, but they create a ripple effect on other aspects of
sports, including creating unique content specific to fantasy sports, increased
viewership on games, increased viewership on highlights, and many more
opportunities in sports media.
No comments:
Post a Comment