Esports
What esports is - and why it works for brands.
What esports is, who watches, and why sponsorship works differently here than in traditional media. Every figure on this page has a source and a year.
The short version
Organised competition in video games.
Clubs with contracted players, leagues with seasons and qualifiers, tournaments with prize money, and broadcasts with commentators and an audience. The structure is the same as any sport. What differs is where it is watched.
Counter-Strike is the backbone of the Nordic scene and has been for over twenty years. Sweden has produced world champions in it since the early 2000s, and the audience that grew up on that is now 25 to 40 years old with purchasing power.
Gaming or esports
Gaming is broad. Esports is the sharp end.
The two get mixed up constantly, and it is the most important distinction to get right. Gaming is everything - billions of people playing anything at all, alone or together, with nothing in common. There is no shared audience, no calendar, and nobody in particular to follow.
Gaming
- Everyone who plays
- No shared calendar
- Nothing to be loyal to
Esport
- The competitive segment
- Seasons and matches
- Players you follow
Esports is a smaller slice of gaming. It is also the top of it - the competitive layer, where the teams, the seasons and the names live. And it is the only part where there is something to be loyal to.
That is why we work with esports rather than gaming at large. It is gaming in a sense, but funnelled down to something a brand can actually stand next to and build on.
None of which makes gaming the wrong audience. If you want to reach people who play, an esports club is the sharpest instrument you have for doing it. The club already carries the credibility, and the association transfers: a message about gaming that comes from a team people actually follow lands harder than the same message with no sender behind it.
The audience
They are not where most media plans are looking.
In 2025 YouTube passed linear TV in Sweden for the first time. Nordicom's Mediebarometern, based on around 6,000 respondents aged 9 to 85, reports the following for an average day:
Nordicom notes that linear TV viewing has a heavy skew towards the older audience. That is the whole point: a media plan built on broadcast TV does not miss this audience by accident. It misses them systematically, every single day.
Who watches
The audience that is hard to reach any other way.
The esports audience is young and global. Exact figures differ between analyst firms, so we only show numbers we can source.
The demographic is the one most brands say they struggle to reach: young adults who do not watch broadcast TV, skip pre-roll, and are quick to spot advertising dressed up as something else.
Why sponsorship
You are not buying attention. You are borrowing trust.
This audience has spent a decade learning to avoid advertising. What they have not learned to avoid is the club they follow. That is the difference, and it is the whole reason sponsorship works here when display advertising does not.
Advertising
- Interrupts
- Is skipped
- Ends with the budget
Sponsorship done right
- Belongs
- Is watched
- Runs all season
Sport keeps people
Following a team is not a campaign you get tired of. You follow the matches, a favourite player, the wins and the losses - and you come back next week to see how it goes. Sport has been building that bond for a hundred years, and esports inherits it whole. A short-lived idea can buy attention once. A club gets it every week, for years.
The arena moved
A traditional sponsor is on the boards at the hockey rink. A forward-leaning one is on Twitch - and in the chat. The function is identical: exposure where the audience actually is. The difference is that this arena has no address, it is open every night, and the audience talks back.
The season never stops
An esports club plays, practises, travels and posts year round. There is no off-season the way there is in most sports, which means a partner is visible continuously rather than in bursts.
The club is the filter
The audience has already decided to trust the club. A brand that shows up inside what the club does inherits some of that. A brand that buys space next to it does not.
Nothing works without content
A logo on a jersey is not a campaign. What makes sponsorship pay is what gets produced around it - matchday, results, launches, film - and someone whose job it is to make sure that happens. We produce content about esports on the platforms where the audience already is.
The Nordics
Four markets that follow each other.
Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland watch the same tournaments, follow each other's teams and share a rivalry that goes back to the beginning of Counter-Strike. For a brand with a Nordic budget that is unusually efficient: one partnership, several markets, no need to rebuild the idea in each one.
That is where we work, and it is why we keep the network small enough that we actually know the people in it.
Sources
Figures on this page are dated. Industry estimates for market size and audience vary considerably between analyst firms, so we name the source rather than presenting a single number as settled fact. Last reviewed August 2026.
- Mediebarometern 2025 – Nordicom, Göteborgs universitet, i samarbete med Bonnier News, Mediemyndigheten, Sveriges Radio och SVT. Cirka 6 000 svarande, 9–85 år. nordicom.gu.se · svt.se
- Mediekonsumtion 2025 – Mediemyndigheten. mediemyndigheten.se
Contact
Want to know more about esports - and whether it fits your strategy?
Tell us what you sell and who you want to reach. If esports is the wrong answer we will say so.