Longitudinal playing trends among daily fantasy sports players

Abstract

Research suggests that populations of gamblers can adapt rapidly to online sports betting services after subscribing. This pattern of adaptation typically shows an initial play increase followed by a sharp overall betting (e.g., amount wagered and number of bets) decline. Such trends are consistent with models of exposure and adaptation. Although exposure and adaptation effects are observable in a variety of situations, currently we know very little about whether these trends are evident for daily fantasy sports. Understanding this is important because many have compared daily fantasy sports with traditional gambling. To examine this issue, we conducted a longitudinal analysis of daily fantasy sports play on the DraftKings website. We followed 11,338 unique DraftKings players, tracking their overall levels of engagement (i.e., total contest entries, total contest entry fees, and total participation) for 27 months. In this paper, we present daily and monthly trends for these activities. We observed increasing engagement over time among a minority of the most involved players (MIP; i.e., the top 1% of players on each engagement metric). Less involved players (LIP), who comprised the majority of the player pool (i.e., the remaining 99% of players on each metric), tended to exhibit elevated initial engagement followed by decreasing engagement over time. Aggregate playing trends for all groups of players were seasonal, with more engagement during National Football League seasons and less engagement during off-seasons. The results of this study suggest that models of exposure and adaptation, in addition to characterizing the population trends of online gambling activities such as online sports betting, likewise can help to explain population trends of most daily fantasy sports players.