NHL franchises. Also in November, the National Basketball Association acquired an equity stake in FanDuel and entered into a four-year sponsorship deal with the company. In April 2015, after the National Football League began to allow daily fantasy providers to sign multi-year team sponsorship deals, with caveats, FanDuel reached deals with sixteen NFL teams for placements on team-oriented digital properties, radio, and in-stadium. DraftKings had also received an investment by Robert Kraft—a local businessman whose holdings include the New England Patriots. Mainstream popularity By 2015, the daily fantasy sports industry had experienced a major growth in mainstream popularity. The rise was credited to several factors, including the convenience of the format, the ability to access the services on mobile devices, and aggressive marketing campaigns which promoted the prospective cash prizes of their largest contests. The structure and payouts of daily fantasy games have been described as providing a feeling of "instant gratification" to its players, similar to that of online gambling. Writing for The New York Times Magazine, Jay Caspian Kang noted that despite its similarities to gambling, DFS appealed to mainstream sports fans because it evoked the feelings of community commonly associated with traditional fantasy sports, rather than the "shady underground games" of poker. The popularity of daily fantasy has also influenced fan engagement with sports; Fox Sports president Erik Shanks felt that daily fantasy sports help improve television viewership of sporting events, while FanDuel stated that players became more engaged with sports content after joining the service. In July 2015, Yahoo!, a historic provider of season-length fantasy sports, announced that it would begin to offer paid daily and weekly fantasy games as part of its Yahoo! Sports website. Moneyball, one of the first Australian DFS services, was also established by former Fairfax Media employees James Fitzgerald and Rax Huq; the company secured $1.8 million in series A funding. Fitzgerald noted that the sports betting industry in Australia had brought in $900 million in yearly revenue and that DFS was "a more ethically and morally preferred means of partnership with a bookmaker." In September 2015, DraftKings and FanDuel expanded their offerings into competitive video gaming; FanDuel acquired the e-sports focused DFS service AlphaDraft (which FanDuel planned to operate as an independent brand), while DraftKings added contests for the 2015 League of Legends World Championship. Increased scrutiny In 2015, daily fantasy sports began to face increased legal scrutiny. In August