Hi everyone, thanks for checking out Sailstream! We've been working on it for nearly two years, and we're finally ready to start onboarding users.
We really enjoyed watching eSports streamers, but we were frustrated that many smaller streamers couldn't make the leap to full time streaming because they needed to support themselves through other means.
After some research, we realized that many companies are looking to advertise in eSports, but find it too difficult to manage and coordinate campaigns themselves. So, we built Sailstream which simultaneously seeks to provide a campaign-management platform for advertisers with great metrics and support streamers who are passionate about gaming and eSports.
We've got a lot of great features in the pipe, and we're excited for people to see what we have to offer.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on what we've built, as well as any other comments or questions!
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Can you talk a bit about the effectiveness of these ads?
It's understood that this tech-savvy gamer market is heavily adverse to ads (i.e. with >50% adblockers). I understand that Adblockers won't block these in-stream ads, but my point is that gamers go out of their way to avoid them and you'll routinely see streamers on Twitch called out for being "sellouts" if they have advertising.
I do believe that either advertising or subscription (or both) need to be effective for eSports to flourish, so I'm on your side, but I would like to hear your expertise on these issues.
@rafiqmaniar Hi Rafiq, I'm sorry for the late reply.
Yes, ad-blockers are a common occurrence in the tech-savvy market, as you put it.
One of the reasons we built Sailstream was to give more support to the small to mid-size streamers who love streaming but aren't able to adequately monetize their stream. Personally, I fully support a streamer who wants to add ads in a corner of their stream if it helps them dedicate more of their time to doing what they love.
Regardless, the decision comes down to what the streamer believes. If they (and their community) prefer a pure stream experience, the streamer just won't sign-up for Sailstream. If they'd like to have control over the ads that display, the streamer can (at any time) opt to manually approve targeted ads before they display on stream.
Thanks!
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Congratulations on the launch.
I am not a esports steaming user however this seems like a solid extension into the active viewership.
Does an advertiser have control over which streamers feeds the ads appear on?
What about split testing ads during an ad buy?
Cheers!
@clarkchambers Sorry for not getting back to you sooner. For our initial launch, we offer two types of advertisements: fill and targeted. Fill advertisements go where there are streamers, so to speak. They're the cheapest advertisement type and great if you're looking to get impressions on your ad immediately. Fill ads are also great because the revenue can support many different streamers, as the ad will play on many different streams.
Targeted ads allow you to target how your ad is displayed. At the moment we only offer targeting an ad to a specific streamer, but in the future we're going to be adding time-based and game-based targeting, to name a few.
We have the functionality to display multiple ads for a single campaign (split testing), but this feature isn't live yet.
Thanks for the questions!
This is pretty intriguing, but there are some concerns...
How do you confirm that ad was displayed? What prevents the streamer from loading this layer below the gameplay but still receiving credit for the impression?
@stugrubbs My apologies for the late reply.
This was an issue we wanted to thoroughly address from the start. We only support one streaming-software at the moment, and the plugin requires that it must be on the topmost layer, so it cannot be below any graphics or gameplay. On our end, we also do some internal checks that the streamer is authenticated and is actually streaming!
In the future, we're looking at implementing automatic screen-capture of the finalized stream, to further verify that the ad has been played.
Thanks for your questions!
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