All about Fanduel. I do prefer the scoring and lineup on DraftKings, but I also don't want to monitor my lineups into Sunday and Monday night.
Also as the market leader, I think Fanduel has a higher percentage of first time players (perhaps only slightly as compared to DraftKings but definitely compared to the smaller sites).
Until this season, I think you are right about FD having a higher percentage of first-time players, but I think DK is closing the gap rapidly due to their massive advertising campaigns.
The major difference is that FD has a slew of H2H games that FD does not...although those are shark-infested waters in many cases.
DK certainly has better commercials, but I tend to see both -- although maybe DK may have more on the air.
One thing to consider for Fanduel: in 2013 they had something like 193k users during football season (I'll assume all were playing NFL, but certainly some were CFB or NBA only). Then last year for the same quarter, that number was 1 million (again will assume all played NFL).
Certainly some users joined in Q1, Q2 or Q3 of 2014 prior to the NFL season, but the number is probably small in comparison. What that means is there were up to 800k new users in 2014 who didn't play in 2013. That's 80% of new users, comprising the majority of the 1 million total.
This is speculation to some extent because users could've played previously and "rejoined" or joined during the earlier part of the year. But I think the vast majority of those 1 million were new users.
This upcoming Q4 2015, there should be a couple million number of users on FD. If you project growth rates from the past, it adds up to near 4 million. If you assume some slow down, it should still be in the 2-3 million range. I don't have the numbers to analyze DK, but I assume that they are also growing at an astonishing rate. John, do you happen to know an easy link to compare the number of users on DKs? Fanduel used to have some fairly specific and detailed financial info on their site, but no longer have it.
The take away here is that its entirely possible there are more new users on FD (and on both sites, for that matter) this NFL season than the total number of users who have played in the previous 3 Q4/Football seasons combined (70K + 193k + 1 million is just around 1.25 million).
http://www.football401k.com/4-tips-from-fanduels-financial-data/