As an esports organization, you’re a lot of things—including a media company. You help cultivate talent, add support through branding, influence, and reach. You are a team—a culture unto itself that adds immense value to the growing love of game viewing worldwide.
But at heart, you’re still also a media company. You curate media for a wide range of audiences with the hopes of building long term viewership. And just like other media companies, the primary means of revenue generation is through advertising.
Diversify the current model to increase revenue for your organization
Revenue Breakdown
Unfortunately, there’s only one real way esports orgs make money right now (apart from revenue shared through the platforms themselves): sponsorship. These sponsorships happen in two different ways:
- Exclusive sponsorship of top performers—It’s easy to see why companies scramble to sponsor streamers with hundreds of thousands of dedicated subscribers like Sushi Bae, Jake the Viking or Autumn. Each streamer has fans who spend hours watching them play every day. The fan dedication and the amount of actual time fans give to these top streamers is a dream for brands trying to connect with a younger audience.
- Event/tournament sponsorship—The 2021 League of Legends finals had a record 74 million Peak Concurrent Viewers (PCV), which is an over 60% increase from the year before. To put it in perspective, the total viewership of the 2022 Super Bowl was estimated at 208 million viewers. With the rapid growth of viewership in streaming esports, it’s not a stretch to say that it may be overtaking the leading sports events in a matter of years. These tournaments provide unprecedented access by brands to an international audience of 18-34 year olds, making it an obvious choice for ad dollar spend.
As the game viewing audience starts to gain recognition and interest among brands and agencies, the potential for esports organizations is written on the wall. But in the current landscape, there are still some common challenges. There are limited ways of monetizing your organization and the majority of your revenue is generated by a small percentage of your team—and an even smaller percentage of your streaming time.
For example, let’s say an advertiser has $35,000 for 3 months in sponsorship, but has $150,000 in media spend for the same time period. We can help you access that media spend by providing aggregation, standardization, reporting and reconciliation.
A game viewer is a game viewer
Traditional media companies generate huge amounts of revenue by spreading a brand’s ad spend across a wide, diverse audience. A viewer is a viewer, whether they’re one of 200 million viewers watching a one-off televised show or one of a dedicated few tuning into a regular broadcast every week.
In the same way, a game viewer is a game viewer, whether they’re watching a top creator, an international tournament, or their favorite low-to-mid tier creator. As a media company, it’s important you leverage the marketability of all of your audience.
How Thece’s Livestream Ad Network adds to your revenue stream
Thece’s Livestream Ad Network (LAN) helps esports organizations capitalize on the game viewing market. By providing both the tech and the advertisers to leverage all your creators, the LAN can help esports organizations get the most out of their media potential.
The LAN works by including advertising as an underlay in streamed content that’s spread across your entire audience. From your top creators to new creators added to your roster, the LAN is designed to provide a consistent revenue stream based on the media-related performance of your organization. Since the Thece ad unit is native to the livestream and is implemented from the professional esports org, brands are pre-approved to run and avoid sponsor conflicts.
In short, Thece amplifies your total earning potential without undermining any of your current revenue streams.
Ready to learn your organization’s media value?
Don’t leave money on the table when you could be earning more without any big change ups to your operations. Contact us directly to learn just how much you could be earning when you become a Thece partner.