Betting companies are one of the main sponsors of the esports industry, and they also actively collaborate with regular streamers. Streaming services almost do not limit the presence of bookmakers on platforms, which the latter actively use: over the past year, the number of their mentions on broadcasts has grown significantly. Who do content makers advertise the most? How have leaders changed over the course of 12 months? In which regions are betting companies the most active? Here’s what we’ve found out.
Most mentioned bookmakers in the names of streams on Twitch
To determine the most prominent betting companies on Twitch we calculated the amount of hours that viewers spent on broadcasts that mentioned bookmakers in the names of the broadcasts. For our analysis, we selected all Twitch broadcasts between August 2020 and August 2021 that mentioned betting companies in their names. We did not consider other appearances of bookmakers in the broadcasts, only mentions in the names of the streams.
In order to form a list of bookmakers, we looked at the names of the streams in which the word "bet" was mentioned, as well as the names of various popular bookmakers. Streams Charts is not responsible for the activities of any of the bookmakers presented in the material and does not recommend betting if you do not trust a betting company.
In preparing the material, we used the Wordstat page by Streams Charts where one can track the popularity of brands in the titles of the broadcasts.
17 companies made it to the top in the period from August 2020 to August 2021, but only three of them really stood out. Streambet, GG.BET and Betway were the leaders among betting companies as they were almost three times ahead of other competitors. The difference between leaders themselves was not that significant, but still Streambet achieved the highest coverage with 27.5M Hours Watched. This company was founded in 2020 and began to actively buy advertising from streamers at the beginning of 2021: and in just six months it became the leader.
For comparison, the live-streamed presentation of the new iPhone 13 from Apple, which was held on September 14 and lasted 1 hour, gained more than 2.2M Hours Watched.
The second most popular bookmaker among streamers was GG.BET. It could have taken the first place as it was leading by a large margin throughout the second half of 2020, as well as the first three months of 2021. However, from April up until now the number of its mentions in the titles of broadcasts fell sharply: to the level of competitors which were 3-4 times behind by the Hours Watched metric.
Betway closed out the top three. Note that this is the only betting company among the leaders that does not specialize in esports. While Streambet and GG.BET focus on CS:GO, Dota 2 and other esports disciplines, Betway covers most of the events in traditional sports and also actively cooperates with sports teams (West Ham and Tottenham to name a few).
The first and third places were divided by less than 9%, but the gap between the third and the fourth turned out to be much more significant: over 71%. It should also be noted that the absence of such large companies as Parimatch and 1XBET in the top three leaders was due to the fact that they mainly use other promotion tools on the market. For example, Parimatch regularly hosts fairly big branded CS:GO / Dota 2 competitions, while 1XBET actively sponsors YouTubers and popular tournaments, such as ESL championships included in the ESL Pro Tour series.
The timeline graph shows that the undisputed leader among the bookmakers in the sample was GG.BET from summer to fall of 2020. But its activity began to decline in October 2020; at the same time Streambet appeared on the market, and in just six months it managed not only to catch up, but also to overtake its competitor.
Betway showed a slightly different dynamic. At the beginning of the third quarter of 2020, it was almost 2.3 times behind GG.BET by number of mentions on streams, and by the end of the year it began to lose even more. However, the company regained its lost positions in 2021, the number of its references is steadily growing.
The rest of the bookmakers are in a fairly dense group. Their indicators did not change as significantly as those of the above-mentioned betting companies. LOOT.BET stands out here; it became active at the beginning of 2021, and now it even bypasses Parimatch, which held the fourth place until that time.
What channels do bookmakers buy advertising on?
Advertising of a particular betting company can be found on almost any broadcast. Bookmakers cooperate with both very small streamers (up to a thousand followers) and biggest ones; these are both specialized esports channels and content makers who spend most of their time on Just Chatting section or some casual games.
Bookmakers most willingly cooperate with the smallest streamers: more than 1.3 thousand channels with the number of followers up to a thousand people have advertised betting companies over the past year. At the same time, the larger the streamer, the less likely it will be a partner of bookmakers: among content makers with an audience of 10-50 thousand followers, several hundred channels advertised bookmakers over a year. At the same time there were only four Twitch streamers with over a million followers, which featured bookmakers on their broadcasts.
Bookmaker’s advertisements can mostly be found on Dota 2 and CS:GO broadcasts. It is these two games that lead by airtime when betting companies were advertised during the broadcast. Interestingly, the top 5 by this metric includes such casual categories as Just Chatting and Grand Theft Auto V.
In terms of the ratio of hours of viewing streams to airtime, the "Sport" category is in the lead, where just 783 hours of airtime accounted for almost 5.4 million Hours Watched. But still no one can compete with League of Legends: 24.4 million Hours Watched during 8.9 thousand hours of airtime: and it should also be noted that advertising of bookmakers is prohibited during official LoL tournaments (but ordinary streamers are not prohibited to advertise betting companies during their streams).
The statistics by the language of the broadcasts in which the bookmaker's advertisements are found may surprise someone. More than 64% of the total Hours Watched are conducted by the Portuguese-speaking segment of Twitch, and almost a quarter of the total amount belong to Russian-language broadcasts. The top three was closed by the English language with only 9.5%: such a low figure is also due to the fact that the gambling and betting industries are regulated much more strictly in English-speaking countries compared to Brazil, Russia or Ukraine.
There is no doubt that the presence of bookmakers in streaming and esports will grow further. Betting companies have successfully entered the industry and have taken the place of gambling sites that drowned in scandals. Recently, Twitch even banned content makers from publishing links to gambling sites, but this ToS update does not affect bookmakers in any way. To sum it all up, the only question is how large the budgets the bookmakers will set for advertising on gaming streaming services.
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