Sleeper Fantasy Eyes ‘Super App’ Play as Social Media Ebbs
Fantasy sports app Sleeper is set to launch a new media business, with its eyes on capturing a larger share of online sports conversations.
The company, which boasts 5 million monthly active users, plans to invest “in the mid-seven figures” in Sleeper Media, an effort to get content creators to post on the platform. The first such poster will be former NFL QB Kurt Benkert, who will launch a Sleeper-sponsored podcast and digital show Tuesday. Sleeper hopes to add 100 creators in the next year, with the goal of facilitating independent accounts as well as hand-picked talent.
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“We’re seeing that (user generated content) is starting to really take root and instead of one single creator platform, it’s now hundreds of thousands, if not millions of creators that are cutting memes, posting highlights, talking about hot takes and doing independent podcasts, diving deep on specific teams and even specific players,” Sleeper CEO Nan Wang said in an interview. “And people are loving that and engaging around it. We’re trying to kind of make sense of what all that content looks like in a social environment that’s dedicated to sports and give it a home.”
Wang added that Sleeper intends to pay posters for the content they add to the app, based on how much engagement it generates.
Sleeper’s new push comes as sports fandom increasingly orients around fantasy and other prediction contests—and at a time when X’s (formerly Twitter) grasp on digital, real-time conversation seems most vulnerable.
Fantasy games, Wang said, represented a great way for the company to scale its user base. But it still represents a small fraction of the fan’s second-screen experience, which also includes checking scores and stats, reading articles, listening to experts, sharing memes and—most important—talking trash with friends and other fans.
“And so what we’re doing now on the media side is a natural evolution adding in other pieces of engagement,” Wang said. “Users are spending 20 to 40 minutes on the app on the fantasy side, but they’re also spending another 20 to 40 minutes somewhere else…. It’s kind of a disjointed, high-friction process right now.”
The ultimate vision is to build a social platform for all forms of sports fandom—a “super app concept where all sports, all engagement, and all your friends happens in one place,” according to Wang.
Having raised $40 million in a Series C round led by Andreeseen Horowitz in 2021, Sleeper now has more than 80 employees and a list of previous investors that includes Klay Thompson and Kevin Durant. The company redesigned its app this summer to add a dedicated feed, which one day could be tailored to individuals’ favorite teams and players as well as their daily fantasy lineups and betting slips.
“I think the content side of the business and the media side of the business is ripe for disruption,” Wang said. “Legacy social media (platforms), a lot of them are declining in engagement and usage. And so where are these audiences going? They need to find a new home.”
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