Odell Beckham Jr. turned to Mojichat’s advertising features during his inaugural live-stream – TechCrunch

Mojiit, the Los Angeles-based company behind the popular avatar generation service Mojichat, has landed one of its highest-profile users with the launch of Odell Beckham Jr.’s live stream over the weekend.

As Odell Beckham Jr. did his first live stream with the gaming superstar Dr. Disrespect, he turned to Mojichat to create the pop-up onscreen emote that danced above a logo from Scuf Gaming, a retailer of customized controllers.

Customized, branded emotes are one of the ways that companies are trying to make it easier for live-streamers to make money off of their shows. Companies like Mochjichat argue that it’s a more elegant solution for gamers to use, because it doesn’t take viewers away from the live stream, where they could potentially miss some of the action.

Typically, streamers rely on advertising revenue from pre-roll, mid-roll and post-roll advertising, according to Mojichat co-founder Jeremy Greene. Alongside his wife, Janelle, Greene built Mojichat into one of the premier names in avatar development. As competitors crowded in, the company has been diversifying its products to allow for influencers to begin using their digital avatars as a monetization source.

“No streamer… wants to run a pre-roll,” said Greene. “The first thing about Mojichat that made us very successful from the very beginning, you have to hunt down someone to make your custom emotes for you.”

Earlier this year, the company partnered with DoorDash on a similar activation for a concert to raise money for the Boys and Girls Club as part of a broad celebrity effort to raise money to alleviate food insecurity for families affected by the COVID-19 outbreak.

“Any time someone sends a communication, that will trigger an alert that floats as a Mojichat animation on top of the screen,” Greene said of the earlier activation. 

The way that Greene describes the service — and Janelle and his larger vision for the company — is to be the next generation of adserver for the live-streaming market.

“My plan is to become the avatar solution for all of Unity,” Greene told me earlier. “We will offer up our platform to every single gaming platform or mobile developer to plug and play… I would consider us… we’re like the Google Admob for live stream.”

Companies like Streamlabs are integrating Mojichat’s features into their streaming offerings. and the work with Dr. Disrespect and Odell Beckham Jr. show just how much demand there is for these types of offerings.

“The avatar space is going to be won in the gaming community,” Greene said.

Mojichat already has 12,000 streamers using the technology right now, and through a partnership inked earlier this year the company expects to push more ads through the service.

“Nobody wants to sit on a stream for 15 hours a day,” said Greene.

“It’s really wrong that streamers can’t make as much money as YouTubers… a streamer can spend all day on Twitch and they are forced to run these pre-rolls… [meanwhile] Jake Paul can upload a video to YouTube and make $300,000… That’s really why I built Mojichat… I wanted to make gamers’ lives easier… We are going to build custom software for gamers that makes their lives easier.”