King Pro League is Tencent’s premier esports league, and it features arguably the largest game in China, Honor of Kings. We know it better as Arena of Valor, however. However, Tencent is teaming up with JD (JD.com) to bring the benefits of e-commerce to such a massive game. The KPL is the top esports league for Honor of Kings and has racked up 24 billion views last year. That’s wild. This makes the JD / Tencent partnership a pretty major deal.
What We Know
This new partnership will have JD be a sponsor for the King Pro League tournaments and will see quite a bit of marketing for Tencent come to life. They will be setting up several marketing campaigns for the league. But if they’re already getting billions of views, can they bring that much more to the table? We think so.
According to the South China Morning Post, a spokeswoman for the company said they would be able to direct millions of esports fans to their platforms. There, they can buy the latest esports merch or tech. It sounds to us like it will be mutually beneficial for both companies.
Live streaming e-commerce is new and hot in China’s retail scene. JD has gone on the record to say that the King Pro league celebrities will also stream on its platforms to promote sales, too. That is a lot of range to advertise both an esports league and new products.
The Chinese businesses are trying to use e-commerce as a way to monetize in esports. There is so much traffic, as we see above. If they could find a way to monetize all of those viewers, they could make an absolute mountain of money. As both e-commerce and esports grow, thanks to the COVID-19 climate, more people are likely to spend money through the internet instead of going out.
“The e-sports industry is exploring ways to monetize [the business model], and this is where JD can weigh in,” said a JD spokeswoman about the Tencent partnership. “We can bring in KPL’s sponsors and fans who might purchase products and eventually become our users.”
Zheng Jintiao, the co-founder of online media outlet GamerBoom, thinks Tencent and JD have come up with an effective marketing strategy. We can’t say that we disagree. “E-sports pros and mega streamers wield just as much influence over their fans as a traditional star,” he said. “This kind of targeted penetration is very effective because e-sports fans are typically quite fanatical regardless of age.”
Esports has grown in China, perhaps more than anywhere else in the world. Revenue for esports grew to 117.5 billion yuan ($16.6 billion), and that’s in just one nation in the whole world. It’s no big secret how valuable esports is, but the Chinese market is the potentially the most profitable, with India coming in hot behind them.
About a quarter of that revenue is through advertising and merchandise and could be one-third of the total revenue by 2021, according to iResearch Consulting Group. This isn’t JD’s first foray into esports either, alongside Tencent. In 2017, they launched JD Gaming, one of the most famous esports clubs in China.
They’re perhaps best known for the Spring Split victory in the League of Legends Pro League this year. So, they have a pedigree in esports, JD does. E-commerce and esports coming together are only natural. This sort of marketing and advertising will surely become more common. The idea is that the massive traffic of esports will serve e-commerce’s growth. Both will wind up making money off of the deal.
Especially right now, when we don’t want to continually spread a deadly virus to our friends and loved ones, e-commerce has become a necessity. Seeing it shift a focus over to esports is natural and expected. We’re just glad to see way more esports and hope that more people will enjoy it readily. The only fear is that e-commerce and esports merging more and more is that we could spend more time watching ads/marketing than the actual matches, and that’s no good.
Source: https://www.esportstalk.com/news/jd-tencent-e-commerce-king-pro-league/
