Interview with Ian Allan

Fantasy sports pioneer Ian Allan, cofounder of the multibillion-dollar industry’s first and longestrunning magazine, Fantasy Football Index, discusses how a collegiate idea became a booming publishing business and how it stays relevant in the digital age.

How and when did your publication begin?
Fantasy Football Index started as a college project when I was at the University of Washington in the 1980s. I worked on the student newspaper there with fellow journalism major Bruce Taylor, who had to come up with an idea for a creativity and innovation class and then take a step to implement it. He decided to start a fantasy football magazine since, to that point, only football publications existed, not fantasy-focused ones. He made me the writer, and we created the first issue and started distributing it.

The first year, we did well enough that we decided to keep going. In year three, we supplemented the magazine by adding updates to the mix, and that portion of our business exploded. Around the same time, we were able to latch on with a national print distributor, and the rest is history.

What means did you use to get information for your updated before the internet?
The first updates were actually done with a typewriter. They had to be timely insights—as timely as possible back then, anyway—so we set up a system where we had one person in every NFL city who would record their team’s games on videotape and FedEx them to us along with snippets from their local papers. Around 1993, the internet exploded, and our company upgraded by getting one of those cutting-edge (at the time) twelve-foot satellite dishes so I could watch the games on tape delay.

How did you make a smooth transition from a print-only publication to a multimedia business?
Magazines used to be the internet: back in the day, there were aisles dedicated to them even at the grocery store. But people don’t buy them like they used to, and so most of our stuff is now online. For example, we post every day on our website, including trivia, to share something interesting. The magazine is more like a setup piece that gets us to the starting line. We work two months on it, and then from July through the end of the football season, we’re sending out multiple weekly online products.

What are the challenges of running a large seasonal business?
We crank out a lot of hours once the football preseason begins— I don’t have the luxury of taking even one day off until January. We want a certain level of quality with our products, which takes time and hard work. We also brought back our baseball magazine this year, so we’re now a little more like a year-round business.

This brings up another point: I’ve generally had to sacrifice other sports to focus on football seasonality. Other people on our team are writing the baseball magazine because I know nothing about the sport anymore—I couldn’t even name four current Seattle Mariners. I also used to love watching the NCAA basketball tournament, the NBA Finals, and tennis, and I haven’t seen any of them for twentyfive years. That’s how focused I need to be on staying on top of football, the sport our customers are most interested in.

Is it safe to say that you won’t be making podcast appearances or splashy reels anytime soon?
I’m glad you brought that up. The hard thing about this industry is that games are mostly played on Sunday and people want advice on Monday. But our company isn’t built for real-time updates—our readers value substance over hot takes. That requires the slow, clunky process of poring through everything, so we don’t start putting out content until Wednesday. As a result, I don’t really have time to pop onto podcasts on Monday or Tuesday because I still have a lot of updated football numbers to look through, audit, and double-check.

That said, we do have our own podcast. I used to appear on it, but I stepped away to let the two current hosts, Colt Williams and Luke Wilson, focus on that and grow it. We have another guy, Arthur Lindhjem, firing away on social media and our new publisher, Andrew Scuoler, is using his social media expertise to figure out new directions for us, such as our recently modernized website. So we keep bringing in more bodies, which frees up time for me, along with contributing editor Andy Richardson, to focus even more on research and ensure that the quality of our products is top-notch. As a bonus, we’re adding all these new revenue sources without having to add much more work.

How does your company’s content stand out in a crowded field? The bottom line is that we’re just trying to share our educated opinions and provide the best products for our customers. I don’t even look at a lot of the other fantasy stuff out there, to be honest; it’s just other people’s opinions. I’m more interested in cutting through the noise and pinpointing what’s driving those opinions, such as the teams’ beat writers. I carefully work through all the football numbers to glean different revelations than what others in the industry provide. That’s what our customers want, regardless of how they get it.

Do you anticipate having to make difficult business decisions about the magazine down the road?
Nothing lasts forever. Eventually, we’ll likely have to stop doing the print magazine. At our peak, our circulation was around 250,000, but that’s been steadily declining, as has our ad revenue from it, both of which factor into our business decisions. It has been a year-to-year discussion over the past few seasons about whether to keep publishing it. We could switch to an electroniconly publication, but that begs some questions: If we did, would longtime fans of the print magazine stop buying our products altogether? Would people who purchase the digital in-season content—our big moneymaker—still do so?

In addition, Andrew suggested, eliminating a certain number of pages to reduce printing costs. So we cut the stats-based ones in the back since people can find most of that information online today. We are still on bookshelves, though— we were the first fantasy football magazine to show up, and we’ll probably be the last to leave.

For more info, visit fantasyindex.com