News Betting Site Hubdub Launches U.S. Fantasy Sports Games

Fanduel.com

The team behind Scotland-based news betting site Hubdub has launched a paid-for fantasy sports game for U.S. fans — particularly those with short attention spans. Fanduel.com allows fans of baseball and NFL to pick a team and go head-to-head with just one other player in standalone games lasting just one day or one week rather than a whole season — with the victorious player winning a cash prize. More at Hubdub’s blog.

So unlike Hubdub — in which users bet on the outcome of real life events for imaginary money — Fanduel pays out real money and charges users $5, $10 or $25 to sign up for each game (although some games are free to join). Hubdub raised $1.2 million in VC funding in January and signed a host of online news partnerships with big name publishers and has grown to 250,000 registered users — but Hubdub has yet to raise substantial revenue of its own — so far.

The US-based Fantasy Sports Trade Association estimates there are 27 million players in the U.S. alone so Hubdub has picked the right verticals in terms of traffic. But whether the site, which has just five staff including Eccles, can compete with the sector’s big boys remains to be seen — Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) and ESPN (NYSE: DIS) both attract more than eight million unique monthly users between them just for their football games, according to Nielsen stats.

But what about sports fans in Hubdub’s native UK? Hubdub founder and CEO Nigel Eccles told paidContent:UK: “The current plan is to focus on the US market for the rest of this year. Although, since we’ve launched (i.e. in the last couple of hours!) we’ve had interest from a major UK football site so we may look into what we can do over here as well.”

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