AWERTI celebrates 10 years: From Esports Charts to global audience analytics

On October 13, 2016, Esports Charts, the first product by ESM.One (now known as AWERTI), was launched with a simple mission: to make esports viewership data more accessible and transparent. Ten years later, we are celebrating a decade of growth and contributions to the global livestreaming industry.

A decade is a long time in livestreaming. And we invite you to look at the stories that shaped ours.

We took a Ukrainian startup global

Our story began in Kyiv, Ukraine, with three co-founders: Artyom Odintsov, Ihor Kryvych and Ivan Danishevsky. Together, they founded ESM.one to make esports audiences easier to measure and understand, with Esports Charts as its first analytics product. 

Our participation in Web Summit 2018 led to an invitation to SOSV's Chinaccelerator, an international startup acceleration program. We joined the program and secured seed funding in 2019. What began with three co-founders has since grown into a team of nearly 50 people working around the world. In 2025, ESM.one became AWERTI, a new identity reflecting our broader work across livestreaming analytics and the creator economy.

We have supported Ukraine's livestreaming industry from its early days

While expanding internationally, we have continued supporting Ukraine's own gaming and livestreaming communities.

In 2017, we helped launch CyberStar League and CyberStar Academy together with Kyivstar, creating opportunities for Ukrainian esports players and aspiring streamers.

More recently, in 2025, together with StreamAdvisor, we began organizing Stream Awards: Ukrainian Edition, celebrating Ukrainian-language content creators. Its second edition reached more than 2.3 million people and helped bring wider attention to the country's livestreaming community.

Our Ukrainian roots remain an important part of who we are.

We looked beyond esports

In 2020, we made one of our biggest decisions: to measure not only esports, but livestreaming as a whole. Viewers were moving freely between tournaments and creators' streams, and esports data alone no longer told the full story. That year, we launched Streams Charts and grew from 100,000 to more than 10 million tracked streamers. More products followed: ChessWatch for the chess audience, DoHuya for China's DouYu and Huya, and MIRAI, our performance-driven influencer marketing agency. Today, our analytics cover more than 60 million channels across a wide range of global and regional livestreaming platforms.

  10 years of AWERTI: Key milestones 

We followed audiences into emerging markets

We recognized the growing importance of mobile esports early and expanded our coverage as its audience grew. By 2025, mobile titles accounted for over a quarter of global esports watch time, and publishers such as MOONTON Games, Tencent, and Garena had become part of our international partner network.

In 2020, Norway Chess became the first chess organizer to turn to us for viewership data, as competitive chess gained momentum on livestreaming platforms. In 2023, we were also among the earliest analytics providers to cover Kick, which has since grown into one of the world's major livestreaming platforms.

We grew together with our clients

Fnatic began working with us when Esports Charts was still a small team in Ukraine and remains one of our longest-standing clients. Over time, we built lasting relationships with esports organizations, tournament operators, game publishers and global brands. Our work has grown to support a wide range of business needs, from ongoing audience measurement to major industry initiatives. One example is Amazon, which integrated Esports Charts data into Alexa, its voice assistant.

Our data became an industry reference

Over the years, publishing data and research has become a constant part of our work, from regular updates to in-depth reports on where audiences are heading. Sometimes the data leads to harder questions, as in our major 2025 study with Audiencly on viewbotting and how reliable online audience measurement really is. That steady work has earned a trust we never take for granted, from small local outlets to tier-1 media like Bloomberg, The New York Times, and Forbes, and even the presidents of the United States and Mexico.

What ties it all together

Almost every step in this story came from the same habit: following the audience wherever it went. That habit is what we take into the next decade.

“When the three of us started, the question was simple: how many people are really watching? Getting an honest answer turned out to be far harder than we expected, and it became the work of our lives. Ten years later, nearly 50 people work on that question every day. They kept building through a pandemic, a Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and an industry that reinvents itself every year. No milestone in this story matters to me as much as the people who stayed and built it with us. This anniversary belongs to them.” 

Artyom Odintsov, co-founder and CEO of AWERTI

We are deeply thankful to our team, to the communities, clients and partners who have supported us along the way. Here's to the next decade of AWERTI and to everyone who will help shape it.