Viewership Impacts of Mobile Esports
Esports is a big and growing industry with gamers, who are also streamers, and viewers that watch gamers. The most popular games are console and PC games such as League of Legends, Fortnite, and Call of Duty. Trillions of hours of streams are being viewed and the majority of this viewing is taking place on Twitch and Youtube. Mobile esports is gaining some ground. While Twitch had 0 mobile titles in the top 20, YouTube Gaming had 5 mobile titles in the top 20 during the first quarter of 2018. By September 2018, YouTube Gaming had 2 mobile titles, PUBG and Mobile Legends: Bang bang, in the top 10 most watched games by viewing hour and 6% of the viewing hours on the top 10 Twitch most watched games were mobile games.
Professional vs Amateur esports viewing
Professional esports leagues and events accounted for 11% of viewership on Twitch and Youtube Gaming in the first quarter of 2018. The remainder, 89% of the streaming viewing hours, are related to non-professional esports.
What does this mean? Let’s assume a whole lot of street, high school, college, and pick-up basketball was streamed to Youtube Gaming and Twitch. These non-professional sports streams might account for 89% of the overall viewing if the esports viewership model stands up. Whereas, and again if the model stands up, NBA accounts for 11% of the total basketball viewing hours. OK, that may be a useful way to think about it, but we are talking esports here.
In the world of sports, we break this down into amateur sports and professional sports. To use that framework, amateur esports dominated streams with 89% of viewership during the first quarter of 2018. And just like in professional sports, professional esports audiences are much bigger, more concentrated and considered primetime.
We can sell advertising in the millions of dollars in professional sports due to large concentrated audiences.
If the sports model holds for esports large concentrated audiences can be well monetized. Content does matter – a lot – to advertisers. Certain advertisers will pull ads from sports and esports that does not comport to specific standards.
Youtube vs Twitch
Most of the professional sports we watch is on network and cable TV. Most of the professional esports we watch is on Twitch. Twitch dominated professional esports viewing in the first quarter of 2018 with 228 million hours streamed compared to YouTube Gaming with 32 million hours streamed. That difference is 2x bigger than a Super Bowl audience compared to the top regular season game audience — Twitch is the ESPN of professional esports.
Where is Facebook Game streaming? Too early to tell, having launched less than 6 months ago.
Mobile esports
Like Facebook, streaming and viewing of mobile esports (professional or amateur) is new. Apple, YouTube, Google, Twitch and other technologies that enable live streaming from mobile games and devices are very new. However, there is some data indicating mobile esports has already arrived. In the first quarter of 2018, Twitch had 0 titles in the top 20 streams, YouTube Gaming had 5 mobile titles in the top 20 and 2 titles, PUBG and Mobile Legends: Bang bang in the top 10 most watched games by viewing hour.
New Zoo tracks esports hours and total hours on both Twitch and YouTube Gaming. According to New Zoo, “Esports hours consists of content from professionally organized esports competitions and does not include individual (pro-player) streams. This content combined with consumer content makes up the total hours watched.”
In September 2018, Twitch had no professional mobile esports content in the top 10, but it did have 1 mobile game in the top 10 for total hours watched — PUBG ranked 6th.
YouTube Gaming had 2 mobile games (ranked 8th and 10th) in the top 10 total hours of professional esports viewed. Those titles move up to 2nd and 7th ranking during the same period for total hours viewed. A 3rd mobile game, Tencent’s Arena of Valor, makes the top 10 list for total hours viewed.
PC and console games dominate professional esports viewership. In September 2018, mobile games consumed 26.7% of the total hours of the top 10 games on YouTube Gaming and only 6% amongst the top 10 titles on Twitch.
