Where do people watch esports?

ESPN, Turner, and CW air esports programs. BBC3 and BT Sport air esports in the UK. Fox Sports announced a FIFA 19 esports US broadcast deal last month. The largest viewership can be found throughout most of the world on Twitch. Microsoft, Facebook, YouTube, and Steam have streaming destinations as well. Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, and others are not available in China. Here, NextJoy.com, Panda.TV, Douyu, Huya, and Netease CC boast audiences over 100 million - similar or larger than Twitch.

Outside of China, YouTube.com/gaming now has 25% of the viewership of Twitch and is growing at 58% YoY. 89.4% of Twitch viewership and 91.8% of 1Q2018 viewership was not live esports events, but streaming viewership outside of live esports events. ​Advertising is based on reach and viewership. The biggest reach and viewership in esports will earn the most revenues.

Currently, around 90% of esports viewership on the two biggest streaming platforms outside of China is a particular type of viewership. Tracking viewership is an important indicator. YouTube gaming has 100% more viewers per channel than Twitch. YouTube has relatively more viewers per streamer/channel than Twitch. Growing this number from the current 52 per channel will be one factor that dictates how many video game players, 2.2 billion worldwide, are turned into viewers.

Over on Twitch, viewers per stream shrunk in 2019 - more streamers, fewer viewers. In other trends, the ratio of YouTube Gaming hours watched to streamed is higher than Twitch and Fortnite lost 10% of viewership in 1Q2019. Super Bowl has also lost 10% of its viewership in the last couple of years. Fortnite and Super Bowl are still very strong.

At the same time, mobile streaming is growing faster than web and desktop streaming. In March 2019, 413k streamers and 27k paid subscribers were reported on Stream Labs. Stream Labs mobile esports represents about 1.5% of twitch - so a drop in the bucket, but is showing a huge 91% QoQ growth.

#esports #streaming #mobileesports