Fantasy That, Game Maker Scores A Ton

The Age

Friday January 26, 2007

JESSE HOGAN

In an unreal sporting world, a dream team wins out, writes Jesse Hogan.

THE Australian cricket team's dominance this summer has sucked much of the excitement from the Test and one-day matches, but an off-field cricket contest has ensured tens of thousands of cricket fans remain interested.

Cricket Australia and sports website Sportal have both run fantasy cricket competitions, which involve users selecting a mixture of Australian, English and New Zealand players in their own "dream team".

Each player receives points for runs, wickets and catches. The fantasy teams are then ranked by performance, overall and in smaller leagues of friends and co-workers.

The concept replicates similar competitions for AFL, rugby union, rugby league and soccer that have surged in popularity. But while the competitions are competing for users, all have been created and operated by Melbourne company vapormedia.

Despite having only three full-time staff, vapormedia runs more than a dozen fantasy competitions that last year attracted about 350,000 participants. When the company ran its first competition in 2001, it had fewer than 1000.

The managing director of vapormedia, Peter Jankulovski, co-founded the company in 2000 after selling his video game website, hotgames.com, to American dotcom giant FortuneCity.

Jankulovski and his business partner Kelly Barrett declined jobs with FortuneCity, and instead sought to replicate the booming fantasy sports competitions they had seen in the US.

"We spent a fair bit of time in the US back in 2000 . . . and it was a really huge thing there and no one was doing it properly here," the now 28-year-old said.

Realising the end of the dotcom boom meant fundraising for the new company would be virtually impossible, the two bankrolled the venture, even though it meant no income for much of the first year.

That time was spent creating software that could easily be manipulated to suit any sporting competition.

After testing the program in an unofficial AFL fantasy competition in 2001, Jankulovski said vapormedia's big break came later that year when Telstra's BigPond division secured the AFL online rights, and contracted the company to run an official fantasy competition. It attracted 40,000 participants in its first season.

"It was a pretty good result considering most of these people had never heard of the concept before," Jankulovski said. "Tipping's always been a way of life here, and all of a sudden you've got this more hardcore (game)."

The popularity of the competition doubled in two years and doubled again to 160,000 in 2005. There were 230,000 fantasy football participants last year.

In that time, vapormedia also agreed to a deal with Sportal to run competitions across seven sports, and greyhound and horseracing competitions for the governing bodies of both sports.

vapormedia is paid on the popularity of the competitions - the more who sign up, the more it gets.

Jankulovski said the company decided to enable its fantasy league partners to fully customise the competitions, in return for the right to sell to competing companies.

"We've always had non-exclusive deals with everyone," he said. "From our viewpoint, we're basically a service provider - we don't control how they promote it, who the sponsors are."

Cricket Australia website producer David Stone said it was not a problem that vapormedia also ran a rival competition for Sportal.

"From Cricket Australia's point of view, it's actually not a bad thing to have people playing in cricket dream team competitions, so the fact that there's more than one in the marketplace benefits the series," he said.

Similarly, the official Australian Football League competition is rivalled by a competition run by News Limited.

Jankulovski believes it would not make sense for these larger organisations to create their own rival competitions.

"The fact that it is a two-to-three-man operation means that we don't have that substantial overhead," he said. "I mean the fee is probably the equivalent of hiring one or 11/2 people for the next six months."

vapormedia's first major foray away from sports-based fantasy competitions is likely to be a fantasy share-trading game that Jankulovski said had been planned for years.

Besides Australia and New Zealand, vapormedia has run one-off fantasy competitions for companies in South Africa and the United Arab Emirates.

While Jankulovski has ruled out an expansion into the US - "there is something like 200 different players there, and four or five big players" - he said a move into Europe was already being considered.

"The European market's not that different (to Australia's) . . . and we have been actively looking at it, so you might see something in the near future overseas," he said.

© 2007 The Age

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