How the pandemic transformed the role of sponsored content, possibly forever
Marie Dealessandri
Features Editor
Monday 14th February 2022
Gamesight
COVID-19 has changed the way we work and live in a myriad of ways.
While the repercussions on work structure, among others, have been well documented, with the emergence of various hybrid remote/office working models, there are consequences of the pandemic that have been less discussed as far as the games industry goes.
One such change is how it impacted the way we watch content, and subsequently how games companies and content creators have tweaked their approach in the way sponsored content is made.
Sponsored content viewership on Twitch has been consistently increasing year-on-year, games marketing platform Gamesight's CEO Adam Lieb tells GamesIndustry.biz. It grew 63.6% between 2018 and 2019, with viewership more than doubling (265.7%) between 2019 to 2021. Things didn't slow down in 2021 either, with sponsored viewership increasing a further 47.1% from January to October 2020 compared to the same period the previous year.
"There's been a total explosion in growth of content creators, content creation and viewership"
"Everything has exploded -- unsurprisingly -- since COVID. Since February of [2020], there's just been a total explosion in growth of content creators, content creation and viewership," Lieb says. "Every single metric you could possibly look at across multiple platforms, not just Twitch, are all up. Maybe that's obvious at this point: people are at home more, people have more time, they spend more time playing video games, watching video games but, interestingly it does seem that creators on Twitch disproportionately won mindshare during COVID.
"That's something that was somewhat surprising to me, which is just how many more eyeballs have
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