The effectiveness of event marketing in an attention economy: Findings from Twitch live-stream esports tournament events

ABSTRACT

Previous research on the effectiveness of event marketing was predominantly focused on single events and individual participants. This paper aims to expand the scope of inquiry into this topic by investigating how the frequency and magnitude of esports tournament events affect the numbers of Twitch live-stream viewers and channels. Data containing the monthly averages of Twitch viewers and channels in addition to the event dates and prize sizes of esports tournaments were collected from publicly available online sources. 829 monthly observations involving 17 popular esports games were analyzed and the results were further validated by robustness check. It was found that the frequency of esports tournament events significantly increased both the live-stream viewers and channels. However, event magnitude only positively affected viewership but had a negative impact on the number of active Twitch channels. This work applies underused metrics to appraise the effectiveness of event marketing in an attention economy. Empirical evidence based on event frequency and magnitude confirms the marketing efficacy of esports tournament events in captivating viewer attention. On the other hand, however, there might exist a substantial inequality in the distribution of attention (i.e., monetization opportunities) between big and small Twitch streamers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ See https://www.esportsearnings.com/tournaments.

² See https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/esports-directory.

³ See https://www.twitch.tv/directory/esports.

⁴ Preliminary estimation results suggested a significant difference in viewership between battle royale and non-battle royale games. Therefore, when forming the interaction term, only the dummy nbr is used instead of the full set of categorical values of genre.

⁵ The aggregated prize size on a monthly basis can be seen as a weighted version of event frequency, with the weights being the prize money for each event.

⁶ Provided the related coefficients (α₃ = −0.041, p < 0.01; α₄ = 0.010, p < 0.01), if tenure_i = 4, then α₃tenure_i + α₄tenure_i² will be slightly below 0, and if tenure_i = 5, α₃tenure_i + α₄tenure_i² > 0.

Additional information

Funding

This article is funded by the National Social Science Fund of China (Grant No. 17BJY209).

Notes on contributors

Eric Mao

Eric Mao received his Ph.D. degree in Sport and Entertainment Management from the University of South Carolina. He currently works as a lecturer at the School of Cultural Creativity and Management, Communication University of Zhejiang, China