In the DIGITAL 2019: Q3 GLOBAL DIGITAL STATSHOT report, published by We Are Social and Hootsuite, reveals that almost 1 billion people around the world are watching video games tournaments.
According to data from GlobalWebIndex, e-sports audiences have grown to almost 50% over the past 12 months, with 22 percent of all internet users saying that they’ve watched a video game tournament in recent months.
GlobalWebIndex also reported that people spent more than 6 billion hours watching e-sports in 2018, an increase by almost a fifth since 2015, with 40 percent of viewers (around 300 million people) coming from China.
And with a staggering increase of those 16 to 24 -year-olds watching e-sports, the data suggests that the global audiences in this age group have increased by more than 60 percent since this time last year.
With almost 1 billion viewers, e-sports has:
- Double the size of the global audience for Formula 1 motor racing.
- 8 times the number of TV audience for the baseball World Series.
- 10 times bigger than the number of people who watched the 2019 Super Bowl.
The potential of the industry can go beyond tournaments, as streaming platforms of the web allows nearly 3 in every 10 internet users to watch live streams of people playing video games. This amounts to 1.25 billion viewers.
Twitch for example, the popular streaming platform boasts 140 million monthly active users, with some 15 million users watching live game streaming every single day.
In the report, from the 7.7 billion human population, 5 billion people are mobile users. From 4.3 billion are internet users around the world, 3.5 billion people have social media accounts.
"The number of people around the world using social media grew by more than a quarter of a billion over the past twelve months, to reach the 3.5 billion milestone by July 2019," the report said.
"More than 46 percent of the world’s total population now uses social media, but if we focus on ‘eligible audiences’ – people aged 13 and above – the penetration rate increases to 59 percent, with the latest trends suggesting that it will pass 60 percent within the next few months."
And when considering e-sports, its popularity is also caused by the massive 93% of online activities that come from online videos.
With its audience growing, e-sports has become an industry worth more than $900 million.