The tribal operators of Minnesota’s Grand Casino Mille Lacs have launched a new daily fantasy sports site ahead of the new NFL season.
This week saw the launch of Granfantasysports.com, a DFS site powered by EZFantasy LLC, a member of the Small Businesses of Fantasy Sports Trade Association. The site’s stats are supplied by Sportradar US and payments are handled by PayPal.
The site is currently only accepting customers from California, Colorado, Kansas, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.
The casino is run by the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, a federally recognized tribe that also runs the Grand Casino Hinckley. The tribe isn’t a stranger to digital gaming, having offered IGT’s DoubleDown Casino social gaming product to its customers for some time now.
DFS BIGGIES PLAYING IT COOL(ER) ON THE AD FRONT … FOR NOW
Meanwhile, the King and Kong of DFS have dipped their toes back into the television advertising waters, although on a far less grand scale than last year.
On Tuesday, AdAge writer Anthony Crupi took to his Twitter account to document Labor Day TV ad spending by DraftKings and FanDuel. Crupi’s calculations had FanDuel spending a mere $15,942, primarily on the NFL Network, down from over $454k on Labor Day 2015. The spots marked the end of a seven-month hiatus FanDuel had taken from the national TV airwaves.
DraftKings’ Labor Day ad buy totaled $400,537, 25x more than FanDuel, although DraftKings’ total was down nearly 71% from $1.37m on the same day last year. Then again, DraftKings just raised another $153m in venture capital, so the drunken-sailor-level spending may yet begin in earnest any day now.
