How do you make a living playing video games?
Live video streaming is one of the most exciting, confounding, and experimental spaces in tech today. What started as “watching people play video games,” has grown into it’s own subculture and lifestyle. With thousands of independent creators and millions of viewers, the potential for advertising is self-evident.
Potara was an application that empowered live-streamers to rent out their screen-space to programmatic advertising. Think Google AdSense for Twitch.
We started with an MVP, tested it, and built an app on StreamLabs. We created a brand, a site, and an array of animated advertisements. We found willing streamers, advertisers, and partners. And then, as these things sometimes go, Amazon shifted their weight on us (more on that later)…Anyway, here’s an overview of our strategy—what we saw, what we did, and what we learned along the way.
Team: Pat Fives, Sam Tolomei, Ian Eck
My Role: Co-Founder, Principal Designer
Deliverables: An app, a brand, a site, ad assets, and “customers”
Time Frame: March - October 2019
Opportunity
17 million people spend 2 hours every day with their favorite streamer on Twitch
The average daily user is on Twitch for 106 minutes
eSports are expected to surpass MLB viewership in 2020
Our approach
For streamers
On Twitch, Mixer, Youtube or any other streaming site, people use the StreamLabs platform to record their screen—cutting it, animating over it, broadcasting it. Our app lived on the StreamLabs app store. This meant that a streamer only had to download it once for us to then dynamically inject our campaigns into their channel. On the back-end we could shuffle which advertisers went to which streamer, always making sure that at least three were on display over a 30 minute period.
It was important to strike a balance between the sponsors’ interests (impressions, clicks, sales, performance-tracking) with the user experience of the streamers and viewers (not being annoying). At every step, we wanted to keep the ads inconspicuous, attractive, and relevant.
Becoming Ad Men
We used affiliate advertising links to get our first tests off the ground. After fumbling my way through countless After Effects tutorial videos, I made some animated banners for the streamers. Nothing too fancy here. We went for something small and unobtrusive, but also direct.
When thinking about future capabilities for our app, we considered what more interactivity might look like:
This last one is mostly a joke. Never intended for actual use (But I do think this space, more than others, is conducive to experimental risk-taking in advertising)
For advertisers
We asked some experts what advertisers cared about. Of course they wanted the ads to be effective, and they also wanted to track that effectiveness in real time. Views, clicks, sales—all sortable by source and type.
We didn’t have full access to all of Twitch’s user data, so we couldn’t get as granular as Facebook’s ad dashboard. But we did know the demographic of the typical streamer (young, tech-literate gamers, skewing male), and we knew what kind of companies would work (game studios, fast food, headphones, startup web services, etc.).
Branding
Potential logos
Final logo design
Landing page
Closing thoughts
Unfortunately this project has fallen into indefinite limbo. I won’t get into details except to say that Amazon’s tightening grip on the Twitch ecosystem was enough to scare off some crucial partners. I still think the space of “personality entertainment,” which includes Twitch, Tik Tok, Youtube, Podcasts, etc. is a fascinating ecosystem that’s only getting bigger. For better or worse, these systems have a heavy hand in the direction of our culture. I’m currently writing an essay(s) that explores this topic in-depth.