“For the first time ever, gamers now finally have a true social network suited for them,” reads the Twitch website. While gamers are a highly-interactive and lucrative, millennial-filled market, Twitch advertisers aren’t always video game-related. A growing list of brands are purchasing advertising space in the way of pre-mid-and-post-roll videos including Coke, Pepsi, Bud Light, Totino’s and Red Bull, just to name a few.
Brands are also turning to the platform to broadcast its own content, such as interactive scare sessions for Stranger Things and The Magnificent Seven. “We’re having tremendous success with nonendemic brands. The most significant shift we’ve seen is that gamers are now becoming an extremely attractive target,” Anthony Danzi, Twitch’s senior vice president of client strategy told The Wallstreet Journal.
Finding a balance between successful marketing on the platform and getting shut down altogether can be a real challenge for brands. Gamers and their fans aren’t thrilled to have their broadcasts interrupted, after all, which is why Twitch Prime was introduced for subscribers of Amazon. It’s worth a shot for many brands, however, as Twitch hosts 10 million daily active users globally, and those users spend a whopping 106 minutes per person per day on the site on average. Almost 500,000 new subscriptions have signed up since Twitch Prime was announced, according to Justin Wong, VP of Twitch eSports.
Could Twitch be a sleeping giant for advertising dollars? While Twitch doesn’t yet share the same visitor count as Facebook or YouTube, sometimes quality over quantity yields the best results. Twitch claims that 75 percent of its users are male, with 73 percent of them between the ages of 18 to 49, and that the service reaches 50 percent of US millennial males. Studies show that gamers are more interactive and loyal when it comes to brands—a huge reason why non-traditional brands, particularly sports leagues have taken notice.