What is media value in influencer marketing?

Media value is the estimated cost of buying the same exposure through paid advertising. For a live stream it is derived from hours watched and average viewers against a category CPM, which lets a sponsorship be compared like for like against a media buy.

What are hours watched?

Hours watched is total viewing time across everyone watching, summed. One hundred viewers for two hours is 200 hours watched. It is the standard currency of live streaming because it measures duration of exposure rather than a single impression.

Why not just report peak viewers?

Peak is one instant. A stream can peak at 40,000 during a giveaway and average 4,000 across the session, and the brand was on screen for the whole session. Average concurrent viewers and hours watched describe what was actually delivered; peak describes the best moment of it.

How do you prove a stream drove conversions?

With an attributable route out of the stream. Chat commands and on-stream QR codes produce trackable redirects, clicks and installs tied to a specific creator and time window, which is the only clean way to connect a live session to an action.

What should a campaign report contain?

Delivery per creator, not just a campaign total: hours watched, average viewers, airtime and media value for each participant. Then the evidence layer — when the banner was actually on screen, when the brand was actually spoken about, and what the chat and QR routes produced.

Marketers who have to defend the spend · 9 min read

How a live streaming campaign is measured

Hours watched, concurrent viewers, airtime and media value, defined plainly — plus the three signals most agencies cannot report on.

An analyst's desk at night with a campaign dashboard filling an ultrawide monitor

The difficulty with live streaming is not collecting numbers. It is that most of the numbers describe how big the stream was, not what happened to your brand inside it. A report can be full of impressive figures and still fail to answer whether the banner was visible, whether anyone said the product name, or whether a single person acted on it.

The six terms you will see

These are the standard metrics, and every agency reports on some subset of them. Worth having plain definitions to hand, because they are used loosely.

Hours watched: Total viewing time across everyone watching, summed. One hundred viewers for two hours is 200 hours watched. It is the closest thing live streaming has to a currency, because it captures duration rather than a single moment.
Average concurrent viewers (ACV): The mean number of people watching at any instant across the stream. Hours watched divided by airtime. More representative of a campaign than peak, because peak can be one spike.
Peak concurrent viewers: The highest simultaneous audience the stream reached. Useful for judging a moment — a reveal, a giveaway — and misleading as a summary of the whole session.
Airtime: How long the stream ran. On its own it says little, but it is the denominator that turns hours watched into an average, and it is what exposes a long stream with a small audience.
Media value: The estimated cost of buying equivalent exposure through paid advertising. Derived from hours watched and average viewers against a category CPM, so a sponsorship can be compared like for like against a media buy.
Share of voice: Your brand's measured presence in a category over a period, against competitors in the same category. The number that answers whether a campaign moved you relative to the market rather than only relative to yourself.

Why hours watched beats impressions here

An impression on most channels is a moment. On a live stream it is not: a viewer who stays for three hours was exposed to an on-screen banner for three hours, heard the product mentioned several times, and sat in a chat room where other people discussed it. Compressing that into one impression discards almost everything that made the placement worth buying.

This is also why platform ads and sponsorships should not be judged on the same scale. Thirty seconds of pre-roll and three hours of presence are different products, and putting both into an impressions column makes the cheaper one look better than it is.

The three signals most reports are missing

Everything above describes the stream. None of it confirms what happened to the brand within it. These three do, and they are what MIRAI adds to a standard report:

Spoken brand mentions

AI voice recognition detects when a creator says your brand, product or game name on stream, and timestamps each occurrence with a direct link to that moment. That converts “the creator was briefed to mention it” into a counted list you can open and watch — including the mentions that were not in the brief, which are usually the most persuasive ones.

Banner exposure and media value per participant

Tracking when a campaign banner was actually on screen, not when it was contracted to be. Across a roster, this is the difference between a campaign total and knowing which five creators delivered and which two forgot to load the overlay while a stream was live. Media value is then calculated per participant rather than smeared across the campaign.

Chat and QR-code conversion

Chat commands and on-stream QR codes give a live session something it otherwise lacks: an attributable route out. Redirects, clicks and installs land against a specific creator and a specific window, which is what turns a reach number into a cost per acquisition you can defend.

What to ask any agency for

Per-creator delivery, not campaign totals. A total hides the distribution, and the distribution is where the next campaign’s decisions live.
The CPM assumption behind media value, stated openly. Media value is only as honest as the rate it is derived from.
Evidence, not assertion. Timestamps and links for mentions; on-screen duration for banners.
Delivery against the estimate. What each creator was projected to deliver before booking, next to what they actually did.

Where to go next

If you are still choosing an instrument, start with the two ways to buy on Twitch. If the instrument is settled and the shape is not, the nine formats covers what each one delivers, and the placement ladder covers which of them can be attributed at all.

Questions this raises

What is media value in influencer marketing?: Media value is the estimated cost of buying the same exposure through paid advertising. For a live stream it is derived from hours watched and average viewers against a category CPM, which lets a sponsorship be compared like for like against a media buy.
What are hours watched?: Hours watched is total viewing time across everyone watching, summed. One hundred viewers for two hours is 200 hours watched. It is the standard currency of live streaming because it measures duration of exposure rather than a single impression.
Why not just report peak viewers?: Peak is one instant. A stream can peak at 40,000 during a giveaway and average 4,000 across the session, and the brand was on screen for the whole session. Average concurrent viewers and hours watched describe what was actually delivered; peak describes the best moment of it.
How do you prove a stream drove conversions?: With an attributable route out of the stream. Chat commands and on-stream QR codes produce trackable redirects, clicks and installs tied to a specific creator and time window, which is the only clean way to connect a live session to an action.
What should a campaign report contain?: Delivery per creator, not just a campaign total: hours watched, average viewers, airtime and media value for each participant. Then the evidence layer — when the banner was actually on screen, when the brand was actually spoken about, and what the chat and QR routes produced.