Comps

[robby1]

The story with Darik is a sad one-off and doesn’t really bother me. I was bothered by the discussion Twitter about comps to contests. Not sure how widespread but it doesnt seem right that small guy paying customers are not just competing against other paying customers but also a pool of freeriders. Maybe it exists somewhere, but, if not, I don’t see how there isn’t disclosure about this.

[Greg Ambrosius]

The story with Darik is a sad one-off and doesn’t really bother me. I was bothered by the discussion Twitter about comps to contests. Not sure how widespread but it doesnt seem right that small guy paying customers are not just competing against other paying customers but also a pool of freeriders. Maybe it exists somewhere, but, if not, I don’t see how there isn’t disclosure about this.

What comps? Where's the pool of freeriders? Because Zach said this on a podcast it's gospel???

Robby, we have a Marketing budget that is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. This Marketing budget includes discounts for multi-packs, for Early Bird discounts ($100 off each Primetime by May 31st), promotional partnerships with industry companies, the Thursday Night Viewing Party and more. We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to grow the NFBC and NFFC and it's a great plan.

Part of the promotional budget includes promotional partnerships with Rotowire.com, FTNFantasy.com, Fantasy Life and many other companies in the industry. Some of these partnerships we have signed contracts that explain specifically what we pay them for promoting our contests and almost all of them include tracking URLs where we will pay a fee for bringing first-time customers to our contests. We certainly aren't alone in this area of promotion as our competitors work with partners across the industry as well. How else do we grow our user base without these industry promotional partnerships?

Several of our agreements lay out exactly what we pay them in return for on-site promotions and more. And most of these companies also say what they will pay back to have their writers and podcasters play in our contests. So we pay them to promote our contests and they are willing to pay back to have their top guys compete in our contests. It's a win-win for everyone and we certainly wouldn't do that deal if we didn't think it helped bring in new customers and they certainly wouldn't agree to spend back with us if they saw no value in their writers playing in our contests.

Nobody just gets "comped" or a "free ride." Why would we do that? Who is getting that? I'd love to know.

We make business deals with promotional partners to help us grow our contests and we use a well-defined Marketing budget each year to do that. The NFFC has grown every single year since 2004 (2020 the exception because of Covid) and we know that our Marketing plan for 2024 will give us a good chance to grow this year as well. I'm proud of the promotional partnerships we have and I think most of you agree that we are working with great industry companies who have promoted the NFBC and NFFC well. We expect that to continue this year and beyond. Thanks.