HubDub, a fantasy league for designed to monetise news content better for publishers (review), has introduced the ability for users to challenge their friends in making predictions. Here’s how it works: A user sends a challenge to a friend to make a prediction on a particular question. Their friend then gets an email and whenever they complete the challenge they compete on their own friend’s leaderboard. Here is a couple of interesting markets.
Since the new feature was introduced last week HubDub’s Nigel Eccles says their sign-up rate has tripled, while registered users are growing at 4% per week. It’s pitch to publishers is to do a rev-share and monetise their content inside this fantasy league-style environment.
HubDub is clearly on to something. It’s most active users average about 400 page impressions per month and monthly uniques average about 66 per month. By contrast the news industry’s average is 8 pages per month per unique user. The Wall Street Journal‘s figure is 12, The Guardian is on 9, and most blogs average two or three, according to HubDub. According to HubDub the average person reads a newspaper for about 11 hours per week but consume’s the same newspaper content online for about 5 mins per week. By contrast, HubDub, which launched three months ago says it has top users who average 2-3 hours a day on the site, which sounds bizarre, but could well be true. People do enjoy these fantasy games and are known to be not that bothered about being offered prizes, as the Daily Telegraph’s long-running newspaper fantasy league has found.