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How the eSports Industry Fares Against Traditional Sports
How the eSports Industry Fares Against Traditional Sports
In just a decade, electronic sports (eSports) has evolved from an underground culture into a mainstream industry worth billions of dollars today.
The industry is growing at an explosive rate, and with major tech giants like Amazon and Google vying for a piece of the pie, the future of this industry is an exciting one.
It’s no surprise that eSports is often compared to its predecessor, traditional sports. However, eSports certainly has none of the typical confines of a traditional sport—so how does it compare in terms of audience size, market potential, and revenue?
An Equal Playing Field?
eSports is an umbrella term for competitions played on electronic systems, typically by professional video gamers—with the first competition dating back to 1972.
The 16 to 24-year-old audience has increased by 60% since 2017, fueling the rapid growth of this emerging industry. The global audience is expected to grow to 276 million by 2022, with League of Legends tournaments often boasting a higher viewership than some of the biggest U.S. leagues:
Cumulative Viewership (2017 finals)
- NFL Super Bowl: 124 million viewers
- League of Legends: 58 million viewers
- MLB World Series: 38 million viewers
- NBA Finals: 32 million viewers
- NHL Stanley Cup Finals: 11 million viewers
While viewership can surpass that of well-known professional leagues, it doesn’t yet stack up in terms of monetization. That said, this aspect is now increasing enough to be seen as a threat to more traditional leagues.
How Much is eSports Worth?
According to Goldman Sachs, eSports will exceed $1 billion in revenue in 2019, and reach $3 billion by 2022. eSports creates the foundation for an entire ecosystem of opportunities, which include live-streaming, game development, player fanbases, and brand investments for sponsorship and advertising—where 82% of revenue currently comes from.
Although eSports under-indexes on monetization relative to the size of its audience, there is a huge opportunity for it to close the gap, given the predicted 35% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for total eSports revenue between 2017 and 2022.
Getting Attention from the World’s Biggest Players
The success of eSports tournaments is attributed to live-streaming platforms. Amazon’s purchase of leading video-streaming site, Twitch, allowed Amazon to tap into the rapidly growing eSports audience, along with other live-streaming opportunities. Since the acquisition in 2014, the number of average viewers has doubled to 15 million, half of YouTube’s daily viewership.
Google, which lost the bidding war for Twitch, has recently made its own big move into gaming with cloud gaming service Google Stadia. Ultimately, the company hopes it will help keep live-streamers on YouTube instead of competing platforms.
The Future of eSports
Over time, eSports will tap into bigger advertising budgets, and reach national, regional, and global levels, as traditional sports are able to. eSports will also be a medal event in the 2022 Asian Games, which could pave the way for full Olympic status.
As a whole, eSports is starting to seriously compete with the big leagues. With a massive worldwide appeal, passionate fans, and billion-dollar revenues, the industry is only beginning to take flight.
The debate however, is not around the battle between eSports and traditional sports. It is around the shift to celebrating a culture that is completely virtual, over one that is physical—which has much bigger implications.
Business
Charting Revenue: How The New York Times Makes Money
This graphic tracks the New York Times’ revenue streams over the past two decades, identifying its transition from advertising to subscription-reliant.

When it comes to quality and accessible content, whether it be entertainment or news, consumers are often willing to pay for it.
Similar to the the precedent set by the music industry, many news outlets have also been figuring out how to transition into a paid digital monetization model. Over the past decade or so, The New York Times (NY Times)—one of the world’s most iconic and widely read news organizations—has been transforming its revenue model to fit this trend.
This chart from creator Trendline uses annual reports from the The New York Times Company to visualize how this seemingly simple transition helped the organization adapt to the digital era.
The New York Times’ Revenue Transition
The NY Times has always been one of the world’s most-widely circulated papers. Before the launch of its digital subscription model, it earned half its revenue from print and online advertisements.
The rest of its income came in through circulation and other avenues including licensing, referrals, commercial printing, events, and so on. But after annual revenues dropped by more than $500 million from 2006 to 2010, something had to change.
NY Revenue By Year | Print Circulation | Digital Subscription | Advertising | Other | Total |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
2003 | $623M | $1,196M | $168M | $1,987M | |
2004 | $616M | $1,222M | $165M | $2,003M | |
2005 | $616M | $1,262M | $157M | $2,035M | |
2006 | $637M | $1,269M | $172M | $2,078M | |
2007 | $646M | $1,223M | $183M | $2,052M | |
2008 | $668M | $1,068M | $181M | $1,917M | |
2009 | $683M | $797M | $101M | $1,581M | |
2010 | $684M | $780M | $93M | $1,557M | |
2011 | $659M | $47M | $756M | $93M | $1,555M |
2012 | $681M | $114M | $712M | $88M | $1,595M |
2013 | $673M | $151M | $667M | $86M | $1,577M |
2014 | $668M | $172M | $662M | $86M | $1,588M |
2015 | $653M | $199M | $639M | $89M | $1,580M |
2016 | $647M | $232M | $581M | $94M | $1,554M |
2017 | $668M | $340M | $559M | $109M | $1,676M |
2018 | $642M | $400M | $558M | $148M | $1,748M |
2019 | $624M | $460M | $531M | $198M | $1,813M |
2020 | $597M | $598M | $392M | $196M | $1,783M |
2021 | $588M | $774M | $498M | $215M | $2,075M |
2022 | $574M | $979M | $523M | $233M | $2,308M |
In 2011, the NY Times launched its new digital subscription model and put some of its online articles behind a paywall. It bet that consumers would be willing to pay for quality content.
And while it faced a rocky start, with revenue through print circulation and advertising slowly dwindling and some consumers frustrated that once-available content was now paywalled, its income through digital subscriptions began to climb.
After digital subscription revenues first launched in 2011, they totaled to $47 million of revenue in their first year. By 2022 they had climbed to $979 million and accounted for 42% of total revenue.
Why Are Readers Paying for News?
More than half of U.S. adults subscribe to the news in some format. That (perhaps surprisingly) includes around four out of 10 adults under the age of 35.
One of the main reasons cited for this was the consistency of publications in covering a variety of news topics.
And given the NY Times’ popularity, it’s no surprise that it recently ranked as the most popular news subscription.
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