Activision Blizzard Esports League Tries a Nielsen Metric to Take on Traditional Sports
September 04 2019 - 6:29AM
Dow Jones News
By Sahil Patel
Activision Blizzard Inc.'s esports league, the Overwatch League,
is using a longtime TV measurement yardstick to make it easier for
advertisers to consider its programming alongside traditional
sports on broadcast and cable.
The league pits teams against each other in the Activision
Blizzard videogame "Overwatch" during a recurring regular season
that is modeled on traditional pro sports, with competitions
viewable online and on TV around the world. The overall prize pool
for the 2019 season is $5 million.
The Overwatch League in February began releasing Nielsen
viewership reports on the average number of people who watch any
minute of a league event, among other Nielsen-backed numbers.
This average-minute audience, or AMA, number has long been used
by traditional sports leagues and broadcasters to show the reach of
live sports across a full broadcast.
Nielsen metrics and the average audience numbers in particular
help simplify the pitch to advertisers because they are familiar
data points, said Frank Puma, investment business lead at ad agency
Mindshare USA.
"As advertisers look for more and more video inventory,
especially within the 18-34 [demographic], this is something that
will help Activision Blizzard be part of the conversation," Mr.
Puma said. "What they're doing is saying: Here is our audience and
we are willing to sell in the way you need to buy it. They are
making it more digestible for ad buyers."
Advertisers in the Overwatch League have included Coca-Cola, Bud
Light and Toyota.
Providing average-minute ratings has helped Overwatch League
sign deals with advertisers that aren't endemic to esports, said
Kasra Jafroodi, strategy and analytics lead at Activision Blizzard
Esports.
Across the Overwatch League's 2019 regular season, which began
in February and will close with its grand finals in September, the
league has averaged a global average-minute audience of 313,000
viewers, up 18% year over year, according to the Nielsen data. That
includes viewing on digital platforms such as Twitch and Asian
streaming players including Zhanqi and Huya, as well as linear
broadcasts in the U.S. and Canada on ABC, ESPN and TSN. Less than a
third of Overwatch League's viewership was in the U.S.
The season has comprised 526 hours of content so far, according
to Mr. Jafroodi.
Viewership for Overwatch League peaked during key moments of the
regular season, which is broken up into four different stages
before the grand finals in the fall. For example, the final week of
stage three averaged 466,000 global viewers per minute, up 86% year
over year, according to the Nielsen data.
Overwatch League trails far behind leagues like the NFL and NBA,
which can pull in tens of millions of viewers in the U.S. alone
during major games, but the esports league boasts a growing
audience.
"It was critical for us to join the conversation about the most
popular and most watched sports programming in the world," said
Pete Vlastelica, chief executive of Activision Blizzard Esports and
commissioner of the Overwatch League.
"There were these old-school digital vanity metrics like unique
viewers and peak concurrent viewers that the esports industry has
been using for a long time to brag about reach -- but those numbers
don't mean anything if you can't make an apples-to-apples
comparison with other programming that we are trying to compete
with," Mr. Vlastelica added.
A key part of Overwatch League's pitch to advertisers is its
reach among 18- to 34-year-olds, a demographic that is becoming
increasingly harder to reach on traditional TV. Overwatch League
averaged 55,000 U.S. viewers per minute in that group during the
regular season, up 11% year over year.
Overwatch League was the first esports promoter to sign a deal
with Nielsen to track its average audiences, but other esports
giants including Tencent Holdings Ltd.-owned Riot Games have
followed suit.
The two-year-old league will be profitable this year, Mr.
Vlastelica said.
Write to Sahil Patel at sahil.patel@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
September 04, 2019 06:14 ET (10:14 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Activision Blizzard (NASDAQ:ATVI)
Historical Stock Chart
From Aug 2024 to Sep 2024
Activision Blizzard (NASDAQ:ATVI)
Historical Stock Chart
From Sep 2023 to Sep 2024