This article, “Participation in Internet
Fantasy Sports Leagues and Mass Media Use” by Quint Randle discusses a study
done to try and link fantasy sports with media use, trying to convince all
sports media outlets that having a fantasy sports influence will increase their
viewership.
The
article starts out by discussing how big fantasy sports have become. It goes
through the amount of people playing, which at the time of the article, I
believe they said was around 15-18 million people, noting that fantasy football
was the biggest sport, with 85% of fantasy players saying that they participate
in a fantasy football league. One statistic that I found shocking when I first
read it was how many females say that they are sports fans. I’m not trying to
sound sexist, but when I first read that 70-something percent of females
consider themselves to be sports fans, I thought that had to be a typo. But
when I went back and really thought about it, I think I felt that way because
women’s sports aren’t as popular as men’s sports, and women can be fans of men’s
sports. Some of them may not watch all the time, but they still have a rooting
interest, they still wear a certain team’s clothing, so on and so forth. I was
clearly mistaken in finding that to be shocking.
The
study that this article focuses on was trying to link fantasy sports participation
to media usage. 240 surveys were completed, and based on those results, the researchers
found links between fantasy participation and watching sports highlights, also
between hours spent checking fantasy and days spent following sports in mediums
other than the internet, and between general internet use and hours engaged in
fantasy activity. All in all, the researchers determined that a media outlet
could almost definitely increase its usage/viewership by incorporating fantasy
sports, which is amazing in itself.
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