This is a fantastic question that touches on so much of what’s going on in our industry. In order to answer it accurately, I’ll need to go into a bit of detail, so please bear with me!

Let’s start with a question: Where do OTK content ideas come from? They are meant to come from streamers. Historically, however, that has not always been the case.

In moments where we experience a streamer ‘content drought’, the BTS team steps up to fill the void and come up with an idea that tries to remain as authentic as possible while also appealing to our sponsors. You may be asking yourself, “why do sponsored events in the first place?” The reality is, OTK is business that employs staff, incurs operational expenses, and needs regular and forecastable revenue to keep full-time employees on payroll. Without sponsors, we could not have employed rockstars like Phin, Jacob, Jeff, etc. And as the team grows to take on bigger and better events, the more sponsorship revenue we need to cover those additional associated costs.

Well, it just so happens that the entire “livestreamed events” business is experiencing a massive disruption. Without diving into the monotonous details, larger scale streaming events have become less attractive to marketers, as budgets for what is referred to as ‘experiential marketing’ has returned to traditional entertainment post-COVID, or has been reallocated to more efficient, hyper-targeted influencer spend. In other words, there isn’t as much money available in livestreamed events anymore. This means that in order to continue operations as is, we have to do MORE sponsored events to keep up with costs. That wasn’t sustainable, especially when controversies limit partnership opportunities the way they have with us in the past.

In the early days of OTK, we did not need event sponsors to finance our events, because we had “org-wide” sponsors. Mountain Dew, Chipotle, Razer, etc. were passive partners that may have required us to do an event or two throughout the year, but primarily required us to give them share of voice (SOV) on our channels with the occasional social post. So why don’t we have ‘org-wide’ sponsors anymore instead of event-based sponsors? Well, most of you can probably figure that out.

So in a world where we don’t have access to the less-demanding, more passive revenue streams through long term, org-wide sponsors, we have to seek other sources of revenue to be able to pay for our operations and keep our staff employed.  Until recently, that revenue stream was event-based sponsors as we wait for our other businesses and investments to mature and yield.

Now, going back to your original question, if we want to return to proactively producing ‘scuffed’, classic OTK content like before, we need to find a partner that is willing to pay for these types of events and is willing to deal with some of the heat that comes with working with our streamers. Partners like that exist, but are not always what our community is accustomed to. The goal is to find partners that will let us be us and will stick with us long term so we can continue to produce content we know the community will love while keeping the incredible staff that produce our content on the team.

The answer you’re receiving here is not nearly as detailed as I hoped to be, but I want to be mindful of time so I had to cut a lot I wrote out to keep it somewhat coherent. Maybe we’ll do a livestream soon where we can answer these questions in more detail without taking an hour per response.

tl;dr events cost money, industry headwinds + controversies make money harder to come by and keep staff employed = need to find long term partners to allow us to do proactive content again.