eSports, Communities & Storytelling

This explosion in eSports contains hints about the future of content, communities and commerce.

Creators as influencers want to know how to spark and grow engagement as well as how to get paid for their efforts. The most successful also wonder how to scale themselves and not be relegated to being paid arithmetically — i.e. paid by the hour or one-off projects/tasks.

Creators, including brands, influencers, and platforms, must make content that inspires engagement and cultivates “true fans” important for all communities:

The economics of “1000 True Fans”, where a hard-core following of super-fans economically support a creator, dovetails with a recent piece on a “shared values community” business model suggested by Eric Feng. Feng recounts how not all content is subsidized by advertising. The basic idea is that a core base of a creator’s audience is willing to pay ... See more

This is an appealing notion for future communities: that a platform could offer a direct incentive and reward for engagement — with everyone from the semi-regular up to the most prominent of influencers sharing in the economic success of a platform.

A completely engaged community, where all stake holders are rewarded both emotionally and financially, is a powerful economic model for creators and platforms.

In the future, communities, like LinkedIn, could be granted virtual assets along their accounts which would be cashed in upon a liquidity event. Just as new ventures may have had “advisor shares” as compensation for some early parties, tokenization-based solutions could be rolled out for community members.

“There is a personal relationship that rises between the streamer and his audience who can shift the motives of spectatorship from casual watching to fandom. That is what happens today when a spectator presses the follow button on Twitch, then donates, and subscribes.”

That the optimal operating space for influencers is a searchable one, which by definition is content-centric — such an environment is a “gift” from an SEO perspective. The best spaces are topic-driven communities with geometric growth. Examples of such communities included LinkedIn, Stack Overflow, and Behance (where their content silos included ca... See more

We are onto something here. We see that free games could work without ads.