With the launch of ELEAGUE a few days ago, we felt it was the right time to make an informed, even if not perfect, comparison between esports and traditional sports live viewerships.

The graph may not look that good for esports at first sight but sports played with digital interfaces, after a slow start from the mid 90’s onward to 2010, have been growing tremendously over the past few years. The pace keeps on increasing and, considering the recent effort by the AAA gaming industry to try and get a hold of the market on the one hand, and how much TV channels have been pushing recently to get up to speed on the other hand, the upward trend shouldn’t stop anytime soon. One could even predict it’s only the very beginning of the actual explosion as we just went past the tipping point.

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Message from the author

Nicolas Cerrato

gamoloco

Founder & CEO

Here’s what everyone should keep in mind: even after 20 years of eSports dreams and productions, we are only at the beginning of the esports boom. And that’s why, even after taking the major steps they have over the past few years, it’s still too early for esports to compete head to head with the NBA or FIFA.

The major take away from this infographic is not that the NBA on ABC is watched 65x more than ELeague on Twitch, even though that’s quite interesting to know, but rather that after 20 years of growing in the dark, Esports and its numbers can now be displayed on the same chart as the NBA’s.

It will be quite interesting to see what the 2017 and 2018 and later versions of this visual will look like.

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Detailed numbers analysis

Coming later this week to Gamoloco’s blog. This analysis will help decypher the graph for those not already familiar with gaming live streams or sports broadcasting, or both.”

About Gamoloco

gamoloco provides viewership data for gaming live streams hosted on major dedicated platforms such as twitch.tv, hitbox.tv, azubu.tv and more platforms. The collected data is used to create scoreboards for channels on the one hand and games on the other hand. Gamoloco also uses the data to provide dedicated Game pages. Gamoloco numbers are directly taken from the platforms’ API’s and represent more than 98% of the total viewership.

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