What Happened
ELEAGUE, the professional eSports league co-owned by Turner Broadcasting and talent agency WME/IMG, enjoyed a successful opening week. The new eSports league’s tournament, which started on May 24, has generated 150 million gross minutes of video consumption and garnered over 710 million impressions on Twitter so far. We wrote about ELEAGUE’s live-streaming deal with Twitch last week, and ELEAGUE has consistently ranked as the top channel on Twitch since launch, with an additional 3.6 million video views from its Facebook Page. The league’s broadcast on Turner-owned TBS channel averaged 509,000 total viewers during its first primetime telecast, a respectable number for a basic cable channel on a Friday night.
What Brands Need To Do
The impressive audience that ELEAGUE delivered during its opening week shows the vast potential of the competitive gaming industry, which has quickly grown into a media opportunity that attracts a massive audience and generates billions of dollars in recent years. Some early-adopting brands, such as Coca-Cola and Geico, have been sponsoring eSports events to reach its young, male-skewing audience. Therefore, brands should consider leveraging the massive reach of eSports events to reach consumers via sponsorships and ads.
Source: ELEAGUE
Header image is a promotional image courtesy of e-league.com