Today it is impossible to turn on a major sports channel without mentioning eSports. Over the past few years, e-sports has seen rapid growth, which has no analogs in any other sports industry.

At the largest international competitions, by the mid-2000s, prize banks reached a million dollars. The number of eSports disciplines has grown. In just a few years, new genres were added — MMORPG, MOBA, etc. Each genre individually attracted not only players but also new spectators.

An important step in the popularization of the gaming industry was the emergence of streaming platforms. They brought the concept of Let’s play from television to the Internet.

Advertisers sponsor individual streams and entire tournaments, and streamers for a fee themselves recommend products to their viewers on the air. Thanks to this, the popularity of not only the streaming service but also the entire e-sports industry as a whole, both amateur and professional, is growing.

E-sports and investments

The teams have regular sponsors. The amounts of promotional transactions are only growing. For example, one of Vitus.pro’s contracts brought the team $ 10 thousand per month. Today, annual contracts between Russian teams and sponsors are estimated at hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The volume of the global e-sports market is more than a billion. Another important trend has taken shape — e-sports teams are becoming an investment asset.

The growth of advertising budgets, corporate investment, and the emergence of professional infrastructure is a trend not only in the Russian market but also in the industry as a whole. All indications are that in terms of mass and economy, it is steadily approaching the popular “traditional” sports.

At the junction of blockchain and marketing, new tools for placing in-game advertising appear. Startups are already developing solutions that involve the gaming environment — virtual billboards, the appearance of the characters, etc. The blockchain serves as a tool to combat fraud — data on the placement of ads is recorded in a permanent registry. For advertisers, this is an additional guarantee that their budgets are spent efficiently.