AWERTI at 10: Artyom Odintsov on the Decisions, Challenges, and Future

Ten years of building a company is mostly a story of decisions: some made with confidence, many made with doubt, and a few that only made sense in hindsight.

In our anniversary recap, we looked back at what happened over the decade. This time, we asked co-founder and CEO Artyom Odintsov about the why behind it: the bets that made no sense on paper, the stretch when the company almost didn't make it, the people behind its growth, and the next big decision on his table.

1. Ten years ago, what did you think AWERTI (ESM.One back then) would become? How close is today to that picture?

We launched ESM.One and Esports Charts because, as esports fans ourselves, we wanted to bring transparency to viewership. We had questions about the audiences behind the games and tournaments we followed, and there was no reliable platform to answer them. And it felt like the industry needed one. 

Today, teams, tournament organizers, and sponsors rely on viewership data in their decisions, and audience numbers have become part of everyday conversations across the industry and media. In that sense, we've come pretty close to what we imagined back then.

But our ambitions weren't limited to analytics. We were also interested in the wider streaming ecosystem — from internet TV and helping people become streamers to tools that would help creators monetize their content. Some of those early ideas are finding new expressions today — Stream Awards: Ukrainian edition, our first awards for Ukrainian streamers, is one example. And there are still plenty of ideas we're holding on to, but some of these ideas just need the market to catch up with them.

Winners' announcement stream of the first Stream Awards: Ukrainian edition (2024)   

2. What’s a decision from those ten years that looked risky at the time and turned out to be right? And one you’d undo?

Launching Streams Charts as a separate product in 2020 was very risky. On paper it made no sense: there were already three or more services on the market, and most of them gave their data away for free. Any market analysis would have shown us not to do it.

But we saw an opportunity in something those platforms weren’t offering: the ability to discover and scout streamers by country and dozens of other filters. So before building the product, we decided to speak with agencies to understand what they were missing and what would actually be useful to them, and that helped us a lot. Streams Charts found its audience among streamers, brands, and agencies, and today it accounts for about half of our business.

As for undoing something, I honestly wouldn’t. Of course, not every idea worked out, and we’ve had projects we eventually closed or sold. But those experiences taught us a lot, often at a relatively low cost. What we learned from them still helps us build AWERTI’s products and advise our clients today.

3. When did you realize AWERTI was more than an esports viewership company?

Probably when Streams Charts started getting clients who had never heard of esports: consumer brands, marketing agencies, music labels. They didn’t care about esports tournaments at all. Instead, they wanted to know which creators their audiences were watching. That's when we realized we hadn't just built an esports analytics tool but rather found a way to measure live attention across the internet.

From there, things started expanding in directions we hadn't originally planned. Chess Watch came out of the chess boom in 2023, and our data began appearing in conversations about politics. In 2025 alone, both the U.S. and Mexican presidents referenced Streams Charts data. When your analytics reach that level of public visibility, it's clear you've grown beyond esports.

By 2025, around half of our business came from outside esports. That was a big reason behind the rebrand to AWERTI: ESM.one no longer reflected the scope of what we'd become.

4. Which client or project changed the company the most, and how?

Our toughest client is definitely our own editorial team, who runs the blog/media resources across the platforms. They use our products every day to write articles and reports covering everything from esports to NASA rocket launches, so they know exactly what works and what doesn't. If an editor can't find a number fast enough at 2 a.m. during a Major, there's a good chance it will become a feature request the next morning.

5. When a major event breaks a viewership record, what happens behind the scenes before that number reaches the public?

The hardest part is finding every co-streamer showing the match, especially those who don’t update their stream titles. A streamer might still have “chill stream” in the title while 50,000 people watch the final with him. Luckily our tools catch most broadcasts automatically, but for major tournaments like Worlds, our content team goes through most of the streams by hand, checks who’s actually showing the match, and adds the missing channels to the event.

Once we’ve identified the broadcasts, the work continues. Our analysts look at where viewers came from, when the audience peaked, and how viewers split between official broadcasts and co-streams. Those insights then make their way into our articles, media stories, and client reports.

So when an event hits something like 6.9 million Peak Viewers at LoL Worlds 2024, it’s not one person reading a dashboard. It’s half the company working on the same number from different sides.

6. Was there a moment when you thought the company might not make it?

There wasn’t one dramatic moment, but rather a long stretch of uncertainty. Until around 2019, Esports Charts wasn’t bringing in enough money to support the business on its own, so we needed to take on other projects to keep things going.

We had plenty of ideas and pitched brands with different proposals, some of which turned into real business. We even organized more than 10 major CS and Dota 2 tournaments, including the broadcasts. That work kept us afloat, but it also meant our main product was constantly competing for attention with whatever was bringing in money at the time.

Before our seed round in 2019, most of our early funding was gone, and we founders were covering some of the costs out of our own pockets. Looking back, that was probably the closest we came to not making it. But then things started to get better, mostly due to the strategy adjustment we applied sometime around our participation in the SOSV's Chinaccelerator in Shanghai and the seed round that followed. We came out of this program with an important insight: stop spreading ourselves thin and focus solely on analytics. And it worked. 

7. The core team is in Ukraine but works for clients around the world, across time zones and in many different languages. How does a company this size pull that off?

We ran into the time zone challenge almost immediately. Tournaments starting early in the morning or running late at night were already normal in 2016–2017. Back then, we might publish data two or three days later. Today we show fairly accurate live data during tournaments at any hour and the final data within 24 hours of a match day.

  Part of the AWERTI team  

Automation is a big part of how we manage this, but I think our mindset matters just as much. Even after 10 years, we’ve kept some of that startup spirit. People are proactive, adapt quickly, and are always ready to roll up their sleeves when something needs to get done. There’s a real willingness to figure things out and make things happen rather than get stuck on how things are supposed to work. Combined with our technical expertise and automation, that helps us do a lot with a relatively lean team.

8. What do the people who stay at AWERTI for years have in common?

To name one thing — a genuine curiosity for numbers and, in some way, an analytical mindset. After a big final, the conversation doesn’t stop at who won: people want to know not just who won but how many people watched and why.

That curiosity also shows up in how we spend time together. We run predictions for major events like CS Majors, Worlds, and EWC and organize occasional gaming and GeoGuessr tournaments, especially before the Christmas holidays. 

9. What’s the best idea that came from someone on the team rather than from the founders?

A lot of features in our products come from the team. Product managers obviously drive much of it, but anyone in the company can suggest a new filter or tool, and some of them regularly do (hey, editorial team). 

To name an example, our team had this one idea that streamers loved so much that we decided to make it happen every year, and it is the Streamer Recap. 

  Streaming Recap 2025 — KaiCenat  

It started for Twitch on Streams Charts, and for the last couple of years it has covered five platforms. Our recaps include metrics the platforms’ own recaps don’t, and that’s exactly why streamers share them.

10. What’s the next big decision on your table?

Moving from “how many” to "who."

For ten years our main job was telling the industry how many people watched, and today that part is solved. Now, we want to go a step further and help businesses understand who those viewers are and what happens beyond the stream itself.

And we’ve already made progress in that direction. Streams Charts offers geographic and demographic insights, we’ve conducted online and offline audience surveys, and we have tools that track clicks on client ads, helping brands measure the actual ROI of their investments in esports and livestreaming.

The next challenge is figuring out how far we can take this. We want to give companies a clearer picture of their audiences while protecting viewers’ privacy and keeping our data independent and trustworthy.

Rapid-fire to close: 

• Favorite time of year: October to January. Worlds kicks off our busiest season, followed by the MLBB M-Series. It’s intense, but it’s exciting to watch these tournaments keep pushing viewership records and making esports history.

• Hardest day: February 24, 2022, and the days that followed. My first priority was making sure everyone was safe. Only then did I realize that, despite everything, our data collection had never stopped.

• First metric you check every morning: I used to run our Twitter myself, so I’d start with the retweets and replies to yesterday’s posts. Now the team handles that, and my first stop is our business metrics.