"In particular, what I liked Yahoo for is, from a scorekeeping standpoint, it seemed like it was made for all different levels from beginner to advanced from the very beginning," Pittman said. Part of that reason is ease - why change if it works - but also, Pittman said, Yahoo has done a good job of making small, helpful changes over time. Back in the early 2000s, his league moved online to Yahoo. Jim Pittman, a 57-year-old in Tallahassee, Florida, said he began playing fantasy back when you had to score by hand. "And if I had spent time with fantasy football playing a guitar, I'd be Jimi Hendrix right now." "I'm emotionally involved to a point that's embarrassing," Paonessa said. That's partly because people who play fantasy football typically love it, so they're bound to come back year after year. It's still a Verizon company now.Įven through those struggles, Yahoo's fantasy offering has persisted. By 2016, it sold to Verizon for a (relatively) measly $5 billion. Yahoo did lots well, as Fast Company noted, but never really stood out in one product or made the most of advertising opportunities. It suffered in the 2000 dotcom crash, then infamously passed on chances to purchase Google and Facebook in both company's infancies. It was a company worth some $500 per share giving away this fun, new thing.īut as the internet evolved, Yahoo didn't keep up. So when Yahoo made fantasy free, it was a huge deal. Each of those great American brands could have been swallowed up by us." Hell, we were worth more than Disney, Viacom, and News Corp combined. "We were worth more than Ford, Chrysler, and GM combined. "Our company was five years old," Jeremy Ring, a Yahoo executive from 1996 to 2001, wrote in a memoir, according to Fast Company. Those two stops were basically the internet's directory. It was the web's primary search engine, a major email provider, and the web's second-most visited site behind, you guessed it, AOL. In the pre-Y2K world, there was hardly any tech company as important as Yahoo. And Yahoo made perhaps the most important decision: It made its fantasy football product free in 1999. It was when fantasy football moved online around 1997 - and a computer could do all the math for you - that things really took off. Throughout the '80s there were lots of different rule-systems and it was, well, confusing, to play fantasy football. By 1989, over a million diehards were playing in total, according to a report by the San Diego Union-Tribune. When Yahoo was kingĪ quick history lesson: The initial fantasy rules were invented by Oakland Raiders staffers and a reporter, who then played the first season in 1963. The internet - and, in part, Yahoo - brought the game to the masses. It was like Dungeons and Dragons for those with jockish tendencies. You had to parse through newspapers to get the previous day's box scores then manually score out a fantasy game - player X scored a touchdown, it was a rushing score, that's worth Y, give team Z those points, over and over again. Not to get too far into the weeds here, but it was basically taking up math worksheets as a hobby. "I think we'd quit playing rather than switch to another format."īefore fantasy football went online it was an absolute chore to play. I think we'd quit playing rather than switch to another format." "Yahoo does make it easy.We're a bunch of lazy old farts now and to actually adapt to another format would be inconceivable. "There's never been a conversation about, 'Hey, let's switch to another format," Todd Paonessa, a 49-year-old in California who has been playing in a Yahoo league for 14 years, told Mashable. And that's likely not changing any time soon - the product is actually pretty damn good despite coming from a brand most don't use anymore. ![]() So, here were are, millions of sports fans, glued to a Yahoo app in the year 2020. And back then, Yahoo was still a very big deal. Years ago, in the early-to-mid 2000s, fantasy football boomed in participation for a single reason: the internet. ![]() That's because even as Yahoo has faded toward internet obscurity, it remains an absolute powerhouse in fantasy sports. When's the last time you used Yahoo for.anything at all? Your answer might just depend on a simple question: Do you play fantasy football? In Tales of the Early Internet, Mashable explores online life through 2007 - back before social media and the smartphone changed everything.
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