Nerd News: "A record-breaking year for Turtle Entertainment, the leading eSports company in Europe"

A very interesting article from Turtle Entertainment (EU Esports Company), I suggest reading their entire article, but this section jumped out at me:

All numbers at one glance – Gaming on TV
Total number of viewers in 2011: 73 million
Peak concurrent viewers: 247,000 viewers at the Intel Extreme Masters Global Challenge Kiev (January 22, 2012)
Reached countries: Viewers from 173 countries with content broadcasted in nine languages (German, English, Russian, Polish, French, Portuguese, Chinese, Spanish and Swedish)

It really seems to me that Esports is moving into a new era, many parts of it are going to become mainstream, in the very near future, if they are not already there.

I think certain subsets will always remain nich, just like in conventional Sports, a few Sports are the most popular.  Football (Soccer for the people in the US) & NFL Football dominate numbers wise.

While Sports like Baseball, Golf, etc. are big, they don't compare to Football for viewers and dollars as far as I know.

There are also lots of sports that are not given much coverage Internationally except at the Olympic level.

Which transitions into my closing thought, maybe we will see Esports in the Olympics some day.