“At Burning Man, the audience is the show: the boundaries between stage and public overlap and melt. Every form of self-expression, every fantasy… everything has a place.”
Margherita Missoni
This is the third, and final, installment in a series dedicated to exploring the overlap between esports interest. See the first and second parts, here and here.
The objective: employ audience analytics to fill the gap left by viewership metrics like average minute audience (AMA) and total hours consumed.
What you should know
The previous series piece highlighted the number of game title interests for various esports fanbases. Taking it a step further, these data points provide multi-dimensional insight into the strengths and differences between competitive video game audiences.
The quadrant approach (click image above to enlarge) underscores, that in addition to differences in overall popularity, esports audiences have unique characteristics that must be taken into consideration:
- Balanced: An even distribution across the number of game titles followed
- Mixed: Audience tends to follow multiple titles.
- Fragmented: An uneven distribution across the number of game titles followed
- Niche: Audience mostly follows that game title only
Key takeaways
- There’s more audience diversity across, than within, game genres
- Overall popularity appears to be negatively related to strong niche-appeal
- Similarity to more popular titles could indicate growth potential
Why it matters
The rise of esports as cultural phenomenon is, at its core, a manifestation of the shift in human attention towards interactive entertainment. A medium where barriers between audience and performance melt away, and physical location takes a backseat to consumer interest(s).
Likewise, digital sport is a collection of organic segments within the games-based media space. So, for commercial organizations striving to maximize the market opportunity, it is critical to understand the nature of, and relationship between, esports audiences.
eSports iQ uses AI/machine learning to produce audience analytics that help you understand digital sport fans, their interests and how to interact with them.