3 Ways to Monetise your Livestreams

While the first era of video distribution on the internet was skewed towards on-demand consumption, live-streaming is now well established and growing fast, across sites like YouTube and Twitch – as well as content owners’ own platforms. Sparked initially by gaming content, all sorts of genres are going live online – from sports watch-alongs to cookery.

While it can be difficult to create the same ‘appointment to view’ on the internet as on linear TV, more and more publishers are discovering the power that live can bring, namely:

• Real-time  interaction – resulting in a deeper connection between the content/presenter and the audience
• The ability to react in real time to breaking news or live events (e.g., sports etc.)
• The excitement and unpredictability of live content

Since live streams are usually one-off and can be time and/or money-consuming to produce, the economics of live streams can be more challenging than on-demand. In this article, we explain 3 ways an audience engagement and graphics platform like Dizplai can help you monetise your live streams beyond the usual video and display advertising that third-party platforms offer.

1. Partner integration

Incorporating professional, broadcast-quality graphics into your livestreams featuring news/sports data or audience comments opens up a new way to showcase commercial partner brands as well as calls to action in a striking, consistent and effective way – so that they feel like a natural part of the stream.

Manchester City – Matchday Live (Learn More)

Commercial partners can also ‘own’ audience interaction – such as a poll, predictor or competition – a great way to integrate a partner in a highly visible and relevant way into a livestream and offer the possibility to collect valuable first-party data.

2. Direct Response

Live presenter-led broadcasts combined with the promotion of offers, competitions, merchandise, games etc. has long been an extremely effective combination – as evidenced by home shopping, e-commerce livestreams or gaming channels.

Football clubs that Dizplai works with use our platform as a highly effective way to promote merchandise or membership of their OTT platforms. These can be reinforced using QR codes and discounts / time-specific offers.

3. Paid engagement / Super Chats

Platforms such as YouTube offer live-streamers the opportunity to monetise audience comments directly via functions like Super Chat where viewers can pay the creator to make their questions or comments more visible on the platform.

The United Stand – Live Watchalong (Learn More)

Our CMS surfaces all Super Chats to the presenter/producer so that they can be easily singled out to be mentioned or feed them through to an on-screen graphic – an even more rewarding experience for the fan, increasing the value of a Super Chat.

If you’d like to explore how an audience engagement platform like Dizplai can help you monetise your livestreams, get in touch with us by clicking the button below. To keep up to date with all our client and company news, and get more insights – follow us here.