Rotowire has been a premiere name in the fantasy sports tool industry since it launched in 1997.
Part of staying on top though requires constant innovation, and in the fantasy space, being first is everything, both when it comes to products and when it comes to data and information.
Rotowire Co-Founder Peter Schoenke told SBC Americas the evolution of Rotowire was a natural one, as the site started with traditional season-long fantasy information and the evolution to expand to roster-based daily fantasy sports and, later, pick’em-style fantasy sports was only natural.
After all, the heart of the Rotowire projections involves player data, and that is something that is universal across all facets of fantasy, so the transition is simpler than it may initially sound.
The development of Rotowire’s new Picks & Props app underwent a similarly natural development. The site first dipped its toe into the pick’em projection space with just a single site and things evolved from there.
“Right away, we built the page for PrizePicks that just showed our projections versus PrizePicks and the thing got a massive amount of traffic,” Schoenke recalled.
From there, Rotowire began to add operators and additional bells and whistles before officially “launching” the page this past January. The Picks & Props page continued to generate tons of traffic, but Schoenke and the Rotowire crew had bigger plans.
“We had already had the plans for the app, but then it became an better idea to launch the app, and that’s because the audience for those games–they’re on mobile. It’s just a very compelling mobile product. And so we want to be where they are.”
Since the product is subscription-based, traffic was a plus but not the core of how Picks & Props was being monetized. Offering the info in app form created a level of convenience in a marketplace where players are almost paralyzed with too many options.
“There’s so much data nowadays that you can just sort of get paralyzed by looking at all of it and not really knowing what’s important, what’s not and what to focus on,” Schoenke said of the fantasy information industry. “A big part of the hobby nowadays is to try to figure out what’s important or what areas you’re good at…couting vs. data projections or in-game data.”
For those who are not interested in developing their own statistical analysis, Picks & Props fills an important need.
“This product tries to just distill it all down to something really simple and quantifiable.”
While there are fantasy players who opt for a single source of fantasy information, others use things like Rotowire’s app or projections as a baseline and integrate in other information they find important. Like fashion, stats can become a hot trend and later fall out of favor.
“People are constantly looking for those leading indicators. It’s like a war. And every time that there’s a new stat that comes out from a company like Stats Perform, or Sports Info Solutions or the league’s themselves with the tracking data,” Schoenke said. “Every year, there’s something new, and then we adjust our formulas at Rotowire to figure out how much we want to count on that.”
As for the rumors of the demise of fantasy in the wake of widespread sports betting expansion? Schoenke said they are much ado about nothing. Traditional season-long fantasy hubs like Yahoo and ESPN continue to grow each year and other major metrics indicate all aspects of fantasy sports remain popular. While the stat du jour may change and the formats will continue to innovative, the fundamental love of trying to predict player performance remains steady.
