DraftDay-Rapid-Fire-Fantasy-Sports

Thursday, June 28, 2007

Pardon Our Dust

There were a couple of items that were not put in place in time for last Friday's launch due to last minute negotiations with our lawyers and banking partners. These include acceptance of Canadian customers, and acceptance of Amex and Discover credit cards. All of this is fully approved and is being implemented this week in our software. Sorry for the inconvenience this has caused for our friends up north. I expect all three items to be functioning by the weekend. We currently only accept credit cards drawn from US banks, and do not accept debit cards. This policy will not be changed with the addition of Canadian customers. Canadian customers will be able to use PayPal, a US credit card, or any credit card or checking account tied to their PayPal account as a deposit method.

Contest Offering
We will be expanding our contest offerings as our customer base builds, which is happening rapidly. Currently our mix of contests is weighted heavily towards the lower cost contests, and the number of contest structures currently offered is very small. The number of structures offered will increase and the mix of contests will evolve very fast. Our goal is for most of our contests to offer at least 90% of the entry fees returned in prizes. This is already true and will remain true for all "Heads-Up" contests, and all contests with entry fees of $20 or greater. We will also be increasing the payout percentage for some of the smaller fee contests shortly, as they fill up with more consistency. If you would like to try out an inexpensive contest with a great payout, you can't go wrong with our "Launch Specials". These $1 contests payout 100% minimum of the contest fees in prizes. We plan on offering these for the next few months at least on a daily basis. They are our personal version of a freeroll contest.

Thanks to all the new users and affiliates who have made our first week in operation a huge success!

4 comments:

Unknown said...

When you have a six-player contest with an entry fee of $5 and pay out only $25, then your minimum payout is 83%. When you have ten-player contests with $3 entry fees and pay out $24, your minimum payout is 80%.

Are you planning on going up to 90%? You keep saying you're already there, and you're not.

Blinders said...

I was trying to expain this in the post. We are already there on all contests with a $20 entry fee or higher, and all heads-up contests. We have been running a $20 6-Player all week that pays 90%, and will continue to do so. If you go through our entire contest history, you will see that we have paid out over 95% of entry fees in prizes since our launch. This does not bother us at all, because we expect lots of overlays for the first several weeks as we build a critical mass of users. We are a business as well, and if we can't make any money on the contests we will not be able to continue to provide them.

We are sensitive to our user's feedback, and will be adjusting up the payouts on the smaller fee contests starting tommorow. Not quite to 90% yet, but closer. The $3 and less cost contests which are more for entertainment than serious competition, may remain in the 80-90% range for a while, but you should have planty of choices that have the 90%.

Unknown said...

No, I understand that there are plenty of reasons to pay out less than 90% on the lower tiers. And I understand that each contest has its own payout structure.

But the site said "90% minimum payouts". Now, we both know that there are contests that pay out 90%, so you can claim
that "90% minimum payout" contests exist. The minimums on other contests are lower, though, so it's an odd claim to make on the site (esp. since there are contests - the launch specials - that return 100%; why not claim 100% minimums?)...

It's like a restaurant that has a sign out front, "100% fat-free items". That claim could be interpreted as applying to everything on the menu, even if the intent of the sign is to advertise the particular items that are 100% fat-free.

And the grammatical structure of the phrase "up to 90% minimum payouts" is just a nightmare. Nobody could possibly know what it means without much more detail.

But again, I don't think you're intentionally trying to confuse anyone, and I don't see the claim on the site anymore, so my apologies if this has already been dealt with internally. Thanks.

Blinders said...

The wording on the bullet has been "Industry Leading Payouts" for several days. The "Up to 90% minimum payouts" was confusing to lots of people, so we changed it. We were trying to say that we offer many contests that pay 90% minimum and higher (while still having the ability to payout less i.e. "up to") when there is an overlay, but it is impossible to explain this in bullet form. You may have seen this wording, on a bonus card (Pauly's?), and we will not be able to unprint them, but will update the wording on the next batch.

I have already responded to your request for more 90% payout contests, and you will see that there are 6P and 10P $5 entry contests forming now with 90% minimum payouts.

We appeciate your feedback.