In 2015 Swedish gamer PewDiePie earned $12 million thanks to more than 47 million subscribers on his YouTube page.
More and more, fans are tuning in as gamers livestream games on Twitch.tv, which has more than 1.5 million broadcasters and 100 million visitors a month.
Cedar Rapids startup Streamweaver wants to help gamers monetize their followings on Twitch by connecting them with companies that are eager to get their products mentioned in front of a large audience.
How Steamweaver works
Streamweaver co-founder Keevin O’Rourke sees his company like a talent agency, seeking out gamers to be influencers and companies wanting to break into the influencer marketing. Influencer marketing happens when a celebrity like Kim Kardashian mentions a product in a tweet or Instagram post. Companies hope the endorsement will pay off, though Streamweaver is aiming for a much more specific audience than Kardashian’s followers.
“A lot of Twitch’s viewers are millennial males that have been documented as having luxury purchase desires,” O’Rourke said. “We worked with a company that wanted to market their app to gamers and helped hook them up with an influencer. They would shout it out and give verbal endorsements and saw a conversion rate of 30% and very high engagement rates.”
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Different games work well for marketing purposes. An action-packed game like “Call of Duty” doesn’t have much downtime, so gamers tend to be more focused on playing, and less so on talking directly to their audience. “Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft” is a turn-based game, which means there’s more downtime for players to talk about other things.
“People are watching someone play because they have a personality and keep it fun and engaging when something isn’t going on,” O’Rourke said. “When someone like that is playing a game like ‘League of Legends,’ they might have 30,000 people watching them live. That’s a pretty convincing pitch to brands: ‘We can have 30,000 eyes on your brands right now.’”
Challenger: Gamers themselves
O’Rourke said one of the biggest hurdles has been selling gamers on the idea that they should use their popularity to help market products. While many envy PewDiePie’s income and subscriber numbers, he’s often seen by many gamers as a sellout.
“They think of themselves like renegades, badass people who won’t be pressed by the man,” O’Rourke said. “But at the same time, they want to make this their living. I feel like there’s a bit of a struggle there. Some are super receptive to it, others are saying ‘F off!’ That’s definitely unique to us as a company.”
The other side is convincing companies of the potential of influencer marketing through this platform. O’Rourke said he and co-founder Wes Merrill initially thought indie gaming companies would want to get their games in front of more eyes, but they found that those companies are already very connected with their communities.
Speed round
Streamweaver has been up and running for about two months and currently has 60 streamers on its roster, with four brands using or showing interest in using influencer marketing.
The company was recently selected for the new Iowa Startup Accelerator class. O’Rourke hopes that they can use the experience to work out any bugs and prove that eSports marketing is a viable business model.
“We want to be able to prove we can make sales and that we can provide companies with a service they otherwise wouldn’t have had,” O’Rourke said. “Myself and Wes are all in on this. We hope working with the accelerator will validate the idea and help us make some sales with large clients.”
Level up
For now, Streamweaver is putting its focus on Twitch, but looking ahead, O’Rourke sees things like the Discord app, podcasts and blogs centered around gaming as being targets for their kind of marketing.
“eSports and professional gaming are things where if the forecasts are correct, there will be pretty big opportunities for marketing,” O’Rourke said. “We want to help brands get into those markets and mediums. We started with Twitch, because that’s the lowest hanging fruit.”
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Joe Lawler is a freelance reporter based in Des Moines.
One response to “Streamweaver turns Twitch gamers into influence marketers”
Huh, this is a neat idea. I think there’s a need for something like this, and it has great potential to scale, and I’m guessing low competition on entry. The one issue I see is control. If, for example, twitch decides to offer this service to boost their own revenues, they would take control away from Streamweaver and crush them. Lastly, the human resources component of recruiting could be a huge time sink, leading to passion burnout when, as the article points out, more and more people respond with “F off!”. I wish these guys the best, I’ll be looking out for their continued success after the Iowa Startup Accelerator.