Just six months after launching Yahoo Esports, recent weeks have seen the brand announce new alliances (such as ESL), partnerships with non-endemic brands (General Mills), as well as new series (Late Night League) in its coverage. This week, the division announced a move into collegiate eSports via a new partnership with Riot Games called uLOL Rivalries. The tournament pits 10 teams that represent five college rivalries every week for five weeks at university sites with fans able to vote on the rivalries they want to see square off. Cynopsis asked Zachary John, Yahoo’s VP of Video and Esports about the company’s recent dealings and how they will impact the brand.
On lessons learned since launch: The industry is scaling quickly, with many industry sources reporting a total audience of 300M fans globally this year. We are seeing tremendous interest across major titles from fans globally to our site and social channels. Key tentpole competitions are driving viewership spikes to exceed 1M viewers in a weekend. Our media strategy is focused on authentic voices covering these main events and extending the conversation during the week from people who live and breathe eSports, and enabling them do 24/7 coverage that matters to the community. Getting key talent on board like Travis Gafford has helped Yahoo Esports be a part of the community and tell great stories, and deliver on exclusive behind the scenes access and stories. Our partnerships with ESL and Riot, along with the launch of our weekly live show will allow us to create and distribute more of this original content.
On partnerships: Yahoo produces tons of live shows every year, and partners with advertisers across all of our major verticals in Sports, Finance and News to build advertiser solutions jointly that tell brand’s stories. For eSports, we have a team of in-house talent focused on delivering 24/7 coverage and producing all of our content in both live and VOD. We partner with brands such as General Mills to shape the content formats, integrations and timing to fit their brand objectives. We worked closely with the Reese’s Puffs team leading up to the launch to ensure we could introduce the right mix of branding and specific messaging in a manner that fit the personality of the show and reached 100% of the viewing audience. Our eSports team is filled with content producers and storytellers, and that presents opportunities for advertisers to participate both online and offline, at an early stage in all of our productions including eSports Live Show, ESL event coverage and the recently announced Rivalries events.
On surprises: Nobody is surprised to see the biggest eSports titles by player base draw interest (LoL, DOTA, CS:GO) but we also made an effort at launch to cover Street Fighter V as it was launched, and that has received a positive response. Smash Bros coverage is an area as well where we see incredibly positive audience response that exceeds our expectations. We generally are seeing an over-index of interest in titles that are not as well covered given how title focused much of the community is. We’ve been excited by the early positive interest in Overwatch coverage, as well as the continued interest in Blizzard’s other titles Hearthstone and HOTS.
On partnering with Riot: The partnership with Riot came about through very much mutual interest. Riot was looking for a partner with extensive digital reach, strong product support capabilities, and a brand that connects well with college sports. We worked together to shape the competitive format, the user voting mechanisms, the landing page experiences as well as the advertising opportunities. We are extremely excited to bring Rivalries to market with a lead partner such as uLoL.
College Esports is a growth opportunity for the industry. Building a competition based on traditional sports rivalries is a fun way to drive passion around the competition. Giving fans an opportunity to define which teams will play, and ultimately where the viewing events will take place is a great way to go on the road with these competitions.
