In the period between now and last September, streaming startup twitch.tv has gone from 20 million monthly unique viewers up to 35 million monthly unique viewers and has hired an in-house ad sales team to capitalize on potential ad revenue. The new team, named The Twitch Media Group, is focusing on getting big advertisers in the video game industry to advertise on their site and reach those 35 million viewers.
In addition to the numerous viewers, the site also features 600,000 unique broadcasters a month, and viewers that tune in for about 1.5 hours of streaming per day. The members of the team include Chief Revenue Officer Jonathan Simpson-Bint, SVP Kym Nelson, VP of Sales Andy Swanson and Senior Sales Manager Christina Grushkin. All of the team members have had previous experience in the games press, including Nelson who was VP of west coast sales at IGN for 10 years and Swanson who was publisher of Future US’s Games Group.
The massive increase in the popularity of e-Sports and game streams has fed twitch.tv’s growth, and it seems likely that the built-in sharing capabilities of the PS4 and the Xbox One will only help increase this audience. An audience of 35 million viewers is almost three times larger than the most popular series on television currently, and it’s not limited to any geographical area.
Source: TechCunch
