• by Wayne Friedman , October 12, 2015

Top TV marketers in the daily fantasy sports category, DraftKings and FanDuel, didn’t miss a beat amid “insider trading” deal concerns that rose last week -- with weekly entry fees posting more than $20 million for each operator.

Still, there were some cutbacks among the big players in national TV advertising. This past weekend Thursday, October 8 to Sunday, October 11, DraftKings spent $4.4 million, to iSpot.tv. A week, October 1 to October to October 5, it was $8.6 million.

For a day or two following The New York Times story of alleged insider trading by DraftKings employees, the company stopped some advertising. Additionally, big cable sports channel, ESPN, suspended, for a couple of days, sponsored segments of the company, which included on-air billboards.

But all this didn’t seem to harm revenues some got from entry fees. DraftKings led all DFS companies -- with $25.0 million in entry fees, according to SuperLobby.com, which does analytics for the daily fantasy sports category.

By way of comparison, DraftKings big rival FanDuel upped its national TV ad spending $13.1 million for most recent four day weekend NFL period, Thursday through Sunday, versus $12.8 million the week before.

For both companies, the number of entries were up this past week versus a week before: DraftKings got 4.14 million entries this past weekend, up from 3.75 million the week before; FanDuel tallied 3.38 million; a week ago it was 3.18 million. FanDuel tallied $20.6 million in entry fee receipts for the most recent weekend.

FanDuel netted out higher revenue results than DraftKings after paying out prize money: FanDuel took in $3.5 million; DraftKings, $2.6 million.

Well behind DraftKings and FanDuel was Yahoo’s daily fantasy sports business: $1.3 million in entry fees, 192,000 total entries, and netting $26,625 after paying out prize money.