Why Marketers Should Care about the Growth of the Streaming Industry

The streaming industry is growing perhaps as quickly as any other that could be named. In 2017, users streamed 355 billion hours of content on Twitch, truly showcasing the power of the streaming platform. The nationwide cord-cutting movement is similarly familiarizing the public with the daily streaming of consumable content. “Why does this matter to me,” you might ask. This is good news for any marketer whose goal is to maximize the reach of their content.

It is a universal truth, your target audience lives somewhere on the internet. It’s not a demographic you have to create or a community you have to foster into existence. They already exist, and they are already surfing the web in some capacity. Based on trends they’re probably somewhere streaming a video, as statistics show us that 55% of people watch an online video every day. To the marketer, this pool is a clear personification of a huge amount of potential advertising dollars.

This brings us back to the stream-viewers and cord-cutters of the world. Generation Y, commonly referred to as millennials, are rapidly moving away from the traditional advertising mediums. Whether it be vanilla TV programming or the death of print, they’re unintentionally (or for some, intentionally) distancing themselves from advertisers through their preferred methods of consumption. AdWeek puts it this way, “For advertisers who don’t shift with [millennials], it means losing an opportunity to build brand awareness and affinity with an entire generation of increasingly connected consumers.” With this in mind, marketers everywhere are increasing the value of their advertising dollar by following their audience to the sites they already browse. More often than not, this audience is getting increasingly younger, and are somewhere watching a live stream or an OTT (over the top) video on platforms like Roku or streaming sites such as Twitch.

From a marketing perspective, the statistics behind these mediums are truly staggering. In just March of 2018, 15,000,000 daily (unique) users watched 720,000,000 hours of Twitch content. The endless hours of content were supplied by 3,213,533 unique broadcasters.

Any one of the 19 million active Roku subscribers streams content 50 hours per week on average. That amounts to 9 billion hours of content streamed in just the first half of 2017.

These gaudy numbers don’t only represent a shift in how the next generation will consume content, but also a shift in how advertisers must reach their new intended audiences. If today’s marketer wants to get in front of his or her audience’s eyes, they have to go where their audience already is. Services built on streaming, such as Twitch and Roku, easing the viewer into the transition of connected viewing. By ever-encouraging the public to enter the digital age, where one must be connected to consume content, these companies are making the marketer’s job easier. As more people ease into the habit of streaming their content, you, the marketer, won’t have to worry about finding your intended audience because you’ll know where they are; already streaming something on the web.