Update: DraftKings announced that it has pulled all of its ads from ESPN for the rest of today. It’s unknown what the status of the ads will be beyond Tuesday.

Following the daily fantasy news from Monday regarding accusations of what was essentially insider trading, DraftKings got another piece of bad news on Tuesday. ESPN, one of its major partners, is pulling back on a portion of its original deal. The “Worldwide Leader In Sports” will no longer air sponsored daily fantasy segments in its shows.

For anyone who’s been watching ESPN so far during football season (as well as baseball season), DraftKings-sponsored daily fantasy bits on various shows were very prevalent. Now, they will disappear as the network apparently attempts to slow down its tight-knit association with the Boston-based daily fantasy site.

There’s an obvious and enormous catch to this apparent reining in of DraftKings and daily fantasy at ESPN: The network will still show all of the advertising that’s not directly in a show segment, given its large contract with the fantasy site. This means that the seemingly endless string of commercials and website ads will continue, unabated.

The news was originally announced in an episode of ESPN’s show, Outside the Lines. Show host Bob Ley noted that “ESPN today continued running commercials for the two main daily sports fantasy companies, but has removed sponsored elements from within shows.”

It’s a very limited pullback, but does send yet another shockwave through the sports world, which had hitherto seen an uninterrupted escalation of partnering with either DraftKings or its daily fantasy rival, FanDuel.

Basically, this:

 

Don't get too carried away. You will still see daily fantasy commercials everywhere, just no sponsored segments.
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