inStreamly is a Polish-based platform that facilitates connections between brands and audiences through gaming livestreams at a time when marketers struggle to capture even a fleeting second of consumer attention.

“We live in a world where people scroll every two seconds and brands have to fight for this attention,” states Wiktoria Wójcik, inStreamly’s co-founder and CMO. “Gaming is the last bastion of quality attention.”

As Wiktoria notes, traditional advertising formats often feel intrusive, leading to ad-blocking and active avoidance, whereas gaming offers a solution to this crisis. “Campaigns that fit into the context of the stream are not perceived as an intrusive interlude,” she says. “This is important because the average session on the stream lasts more than 50 minutes, compared to displaying reels for 2-3 seconds, which is a colossal difference.”

Founded in 2019, inStreamly operates in 15 countries, has over 150,000 registered streamers, and partnerships with major brands like Netflix, Samsung, HBO, PlayStation, and Durex. The company targets advertisers seeking meaningful engagement and creators looking to monetize their content without disrupting the viewer experience.

The Technology Behind Contextual Integration

inStreamly’s main offering is its contextual technology that allows brand integrations to become part of the stream rather than interrupting it. The platform works by placing overlays directly into streams based on specific triggers that make the brand’s appearance relevant to what’s happening in real-time.

“We recognize what happens in the game,” Wiktoria explains. “We had a campaign where a hero of a yogurt brand, a hunger monster, was appearing anytime a streamer was just playing badly in Fortnite.” When players ran low on energy in-game, the monster would appear with a contextually relevant message, saying, “Haha, you’re hungry, low on energy, go eat a yogurt.”

This context-awareness extends beyond gameplay recognition. “One of our technologies monitors the streamer’s expressions in real time, so we can appear with our communication contextually, at just the right moment, so that the brand activation has a natural feel that augments the entertainment, rather than interrupting it in an intrusive way,” Wiktoria notes. 

In the case of the campaign for T-Mobile, inStreamly recognized when a streamer mentioned the “fastest network” to display the branded artwork at the perfect time. “Within a month, we had over 10,000 brand mentions of streamers saying ‘the fastest network’ with T-Mobile appearing in this context,” she shares.

The platform can also react to viewer chat messages and adjust based on the time of day. According to Wiktoria, inStreamly’s campaigns deliver “an average 14% point rise of brand affinity, 6% point rise of top of mind, which amounts to four times more than an average meta benchmark for every brand lift metric.”

Image source: inStreamly

Democratizing the Creator Economy

What makes inStreamly stand out in the creator economy is its ability to make brand partnerships accessible to creators of all sizes. “We work with streamers who have 10 viewers as well as those with 10,000 viewers,” Wiktoria explains. “It’s an easy way to make something that was available only to the best, the top streamers in the world, available to all.”

For creators, the process is straightforward: register on the platform, choose which brand campaigns to participate in, and earn money based on viewership rather than conversions or affiliate sales. “It’s no affiliation—you don’t need to convince your viewers to buy anything. You are there to just show things on your stream,” says Wiktoria. “Any streamer can join and earn.”

The creator integrates inStreamly with their streaming software, such as OBS, as a browser source. After reaching a certain earnings threshold (around €20, depending on the market), creators can withdraw their earnings via PayPal or other payment methods appropriate for their region.

As Wiktoria states, this approach preserves the genuine nature of their content and relationship with their audience. “People are also very conscious that a brand appearing in a stream means that streamer is earning money so they can continue to be a better streamer themselves and make more content,” she explains.

A Brand’s Media Solution

From a brand perspective, inStreamly offers a hybrid solution that combines the scale of media buying with the appeal of creator partnerships. “We are not a marketplace where you go and choose one or two influencers that you have to contact,” Wiktoria explains. “We sit somewhere between being a media solution that you buy as media, and buying a certain number of views or reach. But we do it through influencers and at scale.”

Rather than negotiating with individual creators, brands can reach thousands simultaneously through a single campaign. “From the point of view of a brand working with us, you appear inside streams of, let’s say, a thousand influencers at the same time. Those influencers choose that they want to represent your brand. But from your point of view, you have it all reported in one automated dashboard,” says Wiktoria. The company’s largest campaign included over 2,000 streamers participating across France and Poland.

inStreamly measures multiple metrics to evaluate campaign success, including reach, brand awareness, brand affinity, and click-through rates. The platform also provides fraud protection, filtering out bot traffic to ensure accurate reporting. “Around 40 to 60% of traffic on Twitch is made by bots, because there are bots that scrape the chats and usually click every link. We filter out those clicks,” she says.

This approach helps brands address common issues when entering the gaming space. “Brands realize they have to reach gamers. They think about people who play games as a completely different species,” Wiktoria observes. “70% of Gen Z, the biggest generation on earth, currently play games and see them as their favorite entertainment activity.”

The Team Behind the Technology

inStreamly’s founding team brings direct experience with the problems they’re solving. Wiktoria started her career as a streamer before becoming an esports host and eventually co-founding the platform. “It just opened my eyes to how being a creator and having this community around you can be a business and is the future,” she shares.

The idea for inStreamly came from co-founder Maciej [Sawicki], who was both a streamer and marketing consultant. “He was standing on the balcony and thought to himself, ‘Well, this shouldn’t be this hard, we should automate it,’” Wiktoria recounts. Co-founder Szymon [Kubiak] brought valuable brand perspective as the former head of content at Mediacom Warsaw, while Damian [Konopka] serves as CTO and has been “in esports for the longest time.”

The company hires people from the gaming community. “Every person in our team is a gamer and is connected to our industry in a passionate way,” Wiktoria explains. This ensures that every campaign passes what she calls “the cringe test”—the creative team must feel confident enough in their ideas to claim them publicly in stream chats.

inStreamly operates fully remotely, with no physical offices. Instead of establishing locations in each market, they partner with local experts. “In Germany, we work with OMD. In Slovakia, Czechia, and Hungary, we work with Publicis. In Brazil, we work with WARRIOR,” Wiktoria explains. “We try to find people who are leaders in a given market and work together with them to scale.”

Implementation Challenges and Future Growth

Implementing this technology comes with challenges. “The moment you start paying people for something, they will try to trick the system,” Wiktoria acknowledges. The company continuously improves its platform to address issues like fraud protection and brand safety, with certain content categories excluded from the platform.

Looking ahead, inStreamly is expanding its U.S. presence and preparing to launch a new agency brand, New Game Plus. “Our streamer potential is rising like crazy. We have doubled it within a month,” Wiktoria shares.

The new agency initiative reflects inStreamly’s growth from a technology platform to a more complete solution provider. “We are introducing an agency that helps brands navigate gaming in CE, and we are also gathering new types of media and other solutions like influencer, scalable solutions for reaching gamers,” Wiktoria explains.

inStreamly is also exploring ways to enhance partnerships between brands and top-tier streamers. “Everything that we do can easily work for making a single-streamer partnership just more profitable for the brand, more measurable, more fun,” Wiktoria notes.