Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment Invest in Live Stream, Esports Measurement Startup

StreamMetrics has launched StreamMetrics Audience Measurement, a new syndicated data service that demystifies live stream and esports viewership by accurately measuring audience size, demographics, and engagement, providing geographically-relevant data to advertisers, sponsors and brands, game publishers, esports tournament organizers, networks, and leagues.

Using familiar and directly-comparable traditional advertising metrics such as reach, duration, frequency, and average minute audience (AMA), StreamMetrics answers the industry demand for an audience measurement standard. StreamMetrics audience data highlights geographic viewership and thus can isolate viewership by country, including US-only, creating transparency and filling a measurement gap for a market lacking independent media measurement. HBSEV, the investment arm of Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment, a portfolio of global sports and entertainment properties that includes the Philadelphia 76ers and New Jersey Devils, led StreamMetrics’ series seed investment round.

The StreamMetrics approach integrates proprietary data from monthly market surveys it conducts with anonymized network data and API information from platforms such as Twitch and YouTube to deliver its unique demographic insights on streaming audiences longitudinally on a month-by-month basis. Data can be segmented by age, gender, location (region/DMA), household income, employment status, ethnicity, and device type, among other dimensions.

“People are thrilled to finally have access to US viewership measurement data that is cross-platform, rich in demographic viewing insights, and more actionable than global or API-based, Twitch-only numbers,” said Dan Nemo, StreamMetrics Co-Founder and COO. “Our superior methodology and proprietary data set enable valuable new insights about this massive audience, including the power to segment audience demographic by game title, tournaments, and other streaming events.”

According to StreamMetrics, during the weekend of July 20, the US audience watched nearly 14 million hours of live gaming video content on Twitch and YouTube combined, making up 20% of such content consumed worldwide. That same weekend, 3 million unique individuals watched live gaming video content on Twitch and YouTube combined. Of the 326,000 people in the US who watched live gaming content on YouTube, over 26% also watched Twitch during that time.

“The intersection of streaming video and online gaming has created a massive global medium in a fraction of the time it took other interactive media like mobile to develop,” said Seamus McAteer, Founding Board Member of StreamMetrics and founder of M:Metrics, that was acquired by comScore in 2008. “StreamMetrics Audience Measurement provides the data currency required for the advertising and sponsorship opportunity for esports to be fully realized.”