With a young, engaged audience, esports presents a new opportunity for advertisers and marketers looking for the next generation of sports fans, but the relatively nascent genre also brings pitfalls and risks. So teams, platforms and measurement companies are seeking to professionalize, giving marketers with more opportunities and more data, to better integrate their brands into esports content, and to provide a better return on investment.

"It is clear to us that consumers are not going to stand for 16 minutes of ads per hour," Scott Rosenberg, the GM of Roku's platform business, says.

As YouTube makes its premium shows more widely available, marketers are increasingly realizing they don't just have to place their ads next to premium content -- their ads can be the premium content.