Reebok Partners With Esports Analytics Platform Athlane To Connect With Top Content Creators

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As the coronavirus continues to keep Americans indoors, the pandemic creates a captive audience for esports. Streamers now have a greater chance in growing their following as other types of entertainment are cancelled or postponed because of the virus. However, it’s still as difficult as ever to build and monetize a following to be able to stream and play video games full-time.

Two Harvard dropouts, Faisal Younus and Michael Ivkov, noticed how brands and upcoming streamers struggled to connect with one another. The two created Athlane to facilitate these connections. Athlane is a platform where “streamers collaborate with brands and build fan communities to make gaming their career.” The company has recently established a partnership with Reebok to run the latter’s sponsorship campaigns from start to finish. The San Francisco-based company recently raised a $3.3 million seed round from Y Combinator and other top institutional firms, and accredited investors such as Tyler ‘Ninja’ and Jessica ‘JGhosty’ Blevins.

"We invested in Athlane because it's the best way to make gaming your career. Athlane empowers rising streamers with data on their audience and rewards them with sponsorship opportunities. It will be essential for any streamer looking to go pro,” say the Blevins.

Frederick Daso: What is the primary bottleneck for streamers to make gaming their career? Is it time, money, building a following or something else?

Faisal Younus & Michael Ivkov: Discovering what makes your content and community unique is crucial. Building a following can be difficult when getting started; it is dependent on time and collaboration. Going from 10 to 50 to 150 average concurrent viewers is an arduous process. Generating consistent earnings is another bottleneck, as discovery is relatively opaque on the brand side - that's where Athlane comes in.

Daso: How do brands generally collaborate with upcoming streamers? Why are their current methods of outreach and coordination inefficient at scale?

Younus & Ivkov: Endemic and non-endemic brands tend to differ in approach. The latter may leverage in-bound partner interest to structure bespoke affiliate programs or a dedicated sponsorship team to build a department. Non-endemics may try one-off activations, or lean on specialized agencies with rising streamers on their roster.

On the streamer side, these informal one-offs can be taken with a grain of salt — many are contract-less and lack transparency in terms of performance. While potentially successful, these programs are impossible to scale and keep competitive, given the shifting tides of the ecosystem. Athlane Terminal, our end-to-end sponsorship platform, enables any brand to reach audiences at scale with accurate ROI measurement. With legal-tech, automated task-handling, and compliance tracking, Athlane takes care of the busywork so brands can spend their time working on authentic content with the creator. With all of their sponsorships, they can finally track reach, ROI, and several other performance metrics in one dashboard.

Daso: What is driving brands to work more with streamers to advertise their products? How are the underlying demographics of the audiences they are trying to reach changing over time?

Younus & Ivkov: Digital marketing is only useful if it reaches the target consumer, incentivizes real action, and affects brand awareness or sentiment. Brands, especially those with eCommerce businesses, want to reach younger, net-newer audiences to convert into enthusiasts. There are over 2.5B gamers worldwide, and the esports & gaming viewership audience continues to shatter records, particularly with sustained growth during shelter-in-place.

Daso: While you guys focus on the $10B brand-creator sponsorship market, do you think your product, Athlane, could apply to other markets, say micro-influencers women's fashion, for instance?

Younus & Ivkov: Although our software stack — especially Athlane Pro — can service anyone from a micro-influencer in women's fashion to a professional NBA player, we are laser-focused on building the industry standard monetization engine for gaming & esports.

Daso: How does Athlane Terminal perform the heavy lifting for brands getting essential information about metrics on a particular streamer's audience?

Younus & Ivkov: Terminal gives brands an all-in-one engine to discover, engage, and convert gaming communities at scale—no more spreadsheets and high-touch email campaigns to gather information. Terminal's Insights tool provides exhaustive and proprietary analytics ecosystem-wide, with beautiful visualizations, metrics, and summaries. Source, filter, and sign vetted streamers that are relevant across the entire streaming world. By aggregating all content and information around one central node, the creator, there is a real-time lens into communities and their evolution over time in terms of interests and preferences.

Daso: How is artificial intelligence used to provide and improve recommendations for streamers to enhance their content at scale? 

Younus & Ivkov: Athlane Pro is the "business brain" for streamers. Pro uses several machine learning models to understand what compels your fans to support you. Pro's AI-driven insights give creators personalized recommendations on improving and augmenting their stream through differentiated content, suggested collaborations, or category interests. It also provides regularly-scheduled tracking and reporting on sentiment and overall trends. 

Daso: What were some of the critical technical and business decisions made that resulted in Athlane bringing on Reebok as one of its major enterprise customers to execute the shoemaker’s sponsorship campaigns from end-to-end?

Younus & Ivkov: Our technology. For data-driven brands, especially those as massive as Reebok, a platform needs to provide scalability while preserving the authenticity of the partnership while reporting ROI down to the deliverable. From a business standpoint, by building community in an audience of gamers and their fans, outstanding community development in physical-separation is essential.

Daso: When did you realize while you two were at Harvard that Athlane could become something big, leading you both to leave absence?

Younus & Ivkov: We started building Athlane during our Junior year. As many of our favorite content creators began to grow, we were frustrated at how difficult and unstandardized a process it was to go pro. We decided to devote our energy full-time to developing Athlane that year, in early 2019. A couple of months later, we applied to YC’s S19 batch.

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