459,000 years! That’s how much time Twitch users spent watching other people play video games last year, and Facebook wants a piece of the pie.
It may sound strange, but e-sports are insanely popular, and Facebook is seriously considering taking ownership of those video views.
According to one of our sources, Facebook has hired former professional gamer Stephen “Snoopeh” Ellis to build a new team.
Another source tells us that Ellis will report to Guy Cross, who is Facebook's head of gaming partnerships for North America. Ellis will work alongside Ginger Larson.
According to Ellis' LinkedIn, he was hired in May, and he's already been very busy. He's been traveling the world speaking to Facebook's gaming partners. And just last week, Facebook announced a major partnership with game studio Blizzard.
But with Ellis working with the team, it won’t be the last of Facebook’s esports partnerships.
The business is huge. Last year, the average Twitch user watched 421 minutes of esports per month. Twitch had 100 million monthly users as of January 2015.
If Twitch had that many users in 2015, imagine what Facebook could do with 1.65 billion people as an audience. It could know the metrics of views, the time spent on the site, and thanks to that, companies would spend thousands of dollars on ads to sell their games.
Ellis is the right person to make that happen. He is respected by gamers thanks to his success playing the most popular game in the world, League of Legends, professionally from 2010 to 2014. As the captain of the Evil Geniuses team, he managed to take third place at the World Championship.
On LinkedIn, he wrote that during his experience, he “developed an extensive network through the e-Sports and gaming industry.”
It has been shown in the past that Facebook's strategic partnerships have been more than successful.
The celebrity-focused team has already had actors, musicians, and athletes share on Facebook and broadcast via the new Live feature, thus managing to get offers for Instant Articles and more.
One thing is for sure, we haven't seen anything yet.
