How Video Gaming turned into the Newest Spectator Sport
If you enjoy video games, you surely remember the days you spent in a video arcade or internet cafe, playing the newest hits on the market. If you had a few friends or even other players from the arcade watching you dominate the game, you were surrounded by some of the first spectators of video games. Twenty years later, things have changed dramatically: the definition and implications of video gaming as a spectator sport are much deeper now and revenue is one of the new ingredients of this recipe.
Just recently, Amazon purchased the well-known streaming platform, Twitch, for the staggering amount of $1 billion. The executive board of Amazon did an excellent job in understanding the potential of Twitch.tv, considering that video gaming as a spectator sport has not yet reached its peak. The market is still growing; if you want to understand how big it is right now, just check the figures: in July, Twitch had 55 million visitors and together, they watched 55 billion minutes of content on the website. This service managed to overpass HBO Go in the United States and it shows no signs of slowing down.
Spectator sports have been a thing since the dawn of civilization; people paid to watch gladiators in the Coliseum. Nowadays, most of the eSports events are free to watch, thanks to Internet streams. Those who pay are the advertisers. A marketer that decides to place an ad within an eSports environment has high chances of generating customers from the viewers. If you are considering Twitch as an advertising option, using a dedicated video marketing strategy, you might hit the jackpot
Video gaming, just as any other activity, begins at an amateur level. Many of us enjoy playing video games, just as others like Sunday football matches. Things escalate at a slow pace, but some turn towards the professional side. And here is where a program like ESPN gets its fans from: you and I enjoy sports and we tune in to our favorite match on TV. This is what Twitch.tv does for gaming at the moment. People who want to see the highly-skilled players in action start watching either video recordings of their playthroughs, or even better, live streams. eSports have their own competitions, just as other sports have. You may have heard or even watched a few streams done by the Major League Gaming of USA.
Over 20 hours / week watching live streams or recordings
Video specialists have learned more about Twitch’s fans in the past few years and they’ve reached a few conclusions. One of them is that viewers have a high engagement rate, given the fact they are mostly male users aged 18 to 49, usually the most targeted age category by advertisers. What makes things even better is that half of regular Twitch users spend more than 20 hours per week watching either live streams or recordings. Ten years ago, people watched TV just as much and they still remember the best ads shown at that time. If you want a highly accessible and big market to share a short video about your business, then you should consider advertising within video games spectating hubs. Twitch.tv is not the only one, of course, but we couldn’t have given a better example than it, considering its exponential growth and its subsequent Amazon buyout.
To conclude, if you hop on the eSports advertising boat, you will still have a long way to go until you reach the highest point of the wave – this niche is flourishing at the moment and it has great potential for good entrepreneurs that want to sell to this audience.
[Image: (Bloomberg via Getty Images)]
