Survey Says #2: Income, Viewing, Sponsors

Recap

LAST TIME ON SURVEY SAYS: http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?topic_id=443910

For anyone who missed the first Survey Says, I encourage you to look at the link above. I like to think I did a pretty good job.

A quick summary of what this is about/who I am/where I got my data:

I’m the COO of WellPlayed Productions. We did the Twitch half of the Ender’s Game (on Blu-Ray) Tournament, and will also be running/producing the showmatch tomorrow, starbow included. Mostly shameless plug: things start at Saturday, Feb 22 7:00pm GMT (GMT+00:00), and it should be listed on TL, but if I’m more incompetent than expected, you can also go to http://www.twitch.tv/wellplayedsc2 to watch.

Anyway, onto the actual important part. Over the last year or so, we’ve run viewer surveys during some of our events. In 2013, the only events we wholly produced/ran were League of Legends tournaments, with our first SC2 tournament since 2011 being Ender’s Game. I’m going to compare the results across the three survey points I have on hand from the following tournaments:

I’m comparing the numbers I’ve gathered because I think it’s super interesting, it benefits basically everyone involved, (especially sponsors!) and it’s nice to get some actual use out of the surveys.

The list of topics I consider comparable between all three surveys is:

With the first 3 covered in Survey Says #1. I’m going to try to get through the remaining 5 (Income, VOD Viewing, Live Stream Viewing, Esports Sponsor Support, and Adblock) in this post, but might stop early depending on time constraints.
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Revisiting Age

As a quick reminder, the consensus I gathered from Age is that our SC2 viewers are slightly older (2-3 years, on average) than our League of Legends viewers. I am basing many of my hypotheses in the other topics around this.

I’m going to very quickly revisit Age because of a neat infographic I was linked to:

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As it says, that’s a survey from r/leagueoflegends, showing a fairly heavy plurality for the 15-18 range, (44.84%, not including age 13 and 14) with a very slightly lower 19-24 stat (43.86%) which also leaves out age 25, which seem to be slightly short of the sum of the survey takers aged 13 and 14. This does not quite line up with our own numbers

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and seems to indicate that for whatever reason, the high schooler demographic is unable or unwilling to watch our stream. Some possible reasons could be the timing, (many of our streams were either during or soon after typical NA high school hours, or went late on school nights) and accessibility (College aged viewers have easier private computer access). No matter what the reason, the conversion rate of fans to viewers is much higher around the 19-26 age range.

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Income

Okay, now onto Income. (This is in USD, by the way)

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This is the category that has the largest gap between the two League of Legends survey responses. Although many of the results are on par with the differences seen in my last blog, there are two that have 5% differences. I will be referring primarily to the CPS survey in these cases, as it had dramatically more surveys submitted.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that there’s a plurality in the Under $10,000 for all three. With so many young viewers with “Some College” education, it’s difficult to go to school, have a WellPaid job, and watch esports regularly. The substantial 20% margin between SC2 and League of Legends viewers in this category, however, is a key component in my estimation of average age. Combined with the knowledge that most of the viewers in all three events were in the 19-25 range, and again acknowledging that this range is likely flawed to include the majority of college students, but also a substantial amount of college graduates, the message is fairly clear (to me, at least!). By assuming that the LoL viewers in the 19-25 range are more clustered around the 19-21 range, and the SC2 viewers are clustered around the 23-25 age, the small but noticeable margins SC2 has over LoL in several of the Income categories can be easily explained.

I’ve already covered the under $10,000 portion, so let’s move on to the next. $10k to $25k leans slightly (~2%) towards SC2. This is small enough that I’m willing to call it negligible, but it could also be recent college graduates getting their first jobs, or getting part time jobs while they begin the search for something more substantial. All the remaining categories ($25k to $40k, $40k to $55k, $55k to $70k, and $70k+) all have SC2 at about 4% to 5% above League, including a surprising 13.8% of SC2 viewers reporting incomes of $70k (compared to 8.5% and 7.8%). Even assuming all 8 (1.4%) of the SC2 viewers 40 years and older were making that much, it still leaves SC2 at about a 4% lead over League. I honestly have no idea what this means, besides the obvious. I do have some possible guesses, but all of them are based entirely on personal experience, anecdotal evidence, and conjecture. All of the other categories (above the $25k to $40k and below >$70k) can pretty simply be explained by the generally older audience of SC2, but there are notably fewer jobs over $70k than there are between $55k and $70k.

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VOD Viewing Frequency and Live Stream Viewing Frequency

Now, VOD viewing and Live stream viewing are pretty strongly related, so I’ll be combining them both here. But before I put in the numbers, I want to point out the difference between the two. I’m going to assume that the majority of viewers are like me and basically everyone I’ve ever talked to in esports, and largely prefers watching Live content to VODs, given the opportunity. Also, although this is certainly not the case for everyone, I am going to treat VOD viewing and Live stream viewing as negatively correlating. Whenever you watch a live stream, that’s time (usually) not spent watching a VOD. However, because most people don’t spend all of their free time watching esports (either live or VOD), they are not necessarily directly inversely proportional.

VODs:
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Looking at VODs first, I was actually fairly surprised at the frequency of VOD viewing across all three surveys. I’m really interested to know what kinds of stream (Tournament vs Personal Stream vs Highlights vs ???) people are so frequently viewing. I personally very rarely watch VODs, so seeing the majority of people watch VODs at least once a week is intriguing.

Streams:
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Ah, yes. That’s much more in tune to what I was expecting- more than 90% of viewers watching at least one stream at least once a week, with 80-85% watching several times a week, and a significant majority in Daily stream viewers.

Despite my earlier assumptions, it appears that VOD and Live stream viewing are basically unrelated. While the Stream viewing frequency differences seem to be small to nonexistent, the VOD viewing is small to moderate. To easily illustrate why this is, here are two event lists:

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Twenty League of Legends events, compared to seven for SC2. However, for what I’m pretty sure is the first time ever, Liquipedia is slightly inaccurate, and doesn’t have TB’s Clan War listed, so there may be a small amount of events that are unlisted.

Obviously, I took these screenshots recently (yesterday), and it’s not wholly indicative of the event lists during the CLG Premier Series (last February) or Spring Promotion Tournament (back in December). However, since the creation of LCS and WCS, I think it’s a reasonable assumption that this ratio has been approximately maintained. Additionally, a substantial portion of the League of Legends list are events that are targeting a very different demographic. For most North American viewers in both games, the focus is on events in NA, EU, and Korea (and arguably China as well for League of Legends). There are several events on the League of Legends list that are in South America, and non-Korea, non-China Asia, but even with those excluded, it still outnumbers SC2.

Why does that matter? When there’s a substantial amount of high tier talent readily available live, there’s less of a need to look for VODs. For the most part, it’s somewhat rare for SC2 to have regular tournament content after WCS America each day, whereas LCS both has longer days (with the Challenger circuit) and has events like the EUW Challenger Series and NACL on top of it. Hardcore SC2 fans are faced between watching tournament VODs (likely from some of the best SC2 players in the world, playing in WCS EU and GSL) or a personal stream, which is usually the normal SC2 ladder. Additionally, the very history of SC2 is ingrained so deeply in the Korean scene that there’s no real stretch in saying that the NA SC2 viewers have a higher tendency of watching GSL videos than NA LoL viewers have watching OGN Champions (or Korean tournaments of similar quality).

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Sponsor Support

Wrists starting to hurt. On to Sponsor Support:

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Wow. I mean, WOW. The minimum difference is just shy of 25%, with a slightly over 30% max. I mean, it does make sense that SC2 would be higher here, according to my age estimate, but the margin is incredible. I’m going to repeat what I did in the previous Survey Says and compare the number of viewers that are at least 19 years old with the number of people who claim they’ve support sponsors from the same survey. Keep in mind, this is a much more open case than the one before. While it’s extraordinarily rare for a 15 year old to have a Collegiate Degree, it’s incredibly easy for a 12 year old to buy a Coke, or for a 16 year old to buy some Kingston RAM. Something else to keep in mind is that the kind of people who will voluntarily take a survey like this are generally doing so because they are actively trying to support the scene. The viewers who care solely about being entertained will tend to ignore the survey altogether.

Anyway, on to the numbers:
Ender’s Game: 441/459 = 96.07%
Spring Promotion Tournament: 106/159 = 66.67%
CLG Premier Series: 675/890 = 75.8%
Weighted Average of LoL Events: 781/1049 = 74.45%
Weighted Average of All: 81.03%

Ignoring for a second the discrepancy between the two games, that weighted average for all three games seems ENORMOUS to me. Like I mentioned before, the survey takers will tend to skew towards the “good for esports” side, but an 81% ratio is absolutely phenomenal.

I tried doing a bunch of math on some Cost-Per-Click rates that I found with some quick googling and the unique visitors from the stream, but I found that there were far too many assumptions I was making just to create an illusion of progress. If you have expertise in this area, I’d love to talk to you for a bit! I can’t really justify putting a number in here that has so many possibly incorrect guesses, so instead, I’ll move on to the 25% difference (20% difference when adjusted for viewers more likely to have jobs) between SC2 and LoL in this area.

Restating my ‘slightly older’ theory here, as it applies once again to this topic. Additionally, SC2 has been around longer as an “accepted” esport, and far longer if you include Brood War. Not only does this mean that StarCraft fans have had a longer time to support sponsors supporting esports, but it also means there’s been greater variety overall for SC2. GSL has separately been sponsored by both Coke and Pepsi, while the official Riot Challenger league is the Coke Zero League. It is likely that this is simply a matter of time though, given the explosive growth of League of Legends in the past few years. As I pointed out earlier, there are significantly more LoL events happening concurrently, which will surely translate to a wider sponsor base.

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Adblock Usage

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Not too different here, but numbers are lower than I expected. Once again, this probably goes back to the idea that survey-takers are generally pro-esports and will at least consider turning off adblock for sites like TL and Twitch. It’s interesting to note the disparity between the SPT and CPS, with nearly 15% more SPT survey takers reporting having Adblock on all the time. This probably points towards the general viewership of big LoL (or, esports in general) streams, as the SPT was a significant portion of the official Riot LCS promotion tournament, and had the largest viewers of these three events.

Comparing the two games, once again, leads to fairly minor (but noticeable) differences. SC2 viewers slightly trend towards having Adblock off (55% ‘Sometimes’ or ‘Never’), whereas LoL viewers are the opposite (51.5% ‘All the time’ or ‘Often’). It’s somewhat difficult to read too far into this, however, without additional metrics. Viewers were asked only about Adblock, not Adblock on Twitch, on esports streams, or on esports-related sites.

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Conclusion

SC2 viewers seem generally more “hardcore” in supporting esports, with about the same amount of live stream viewing, slightly more VOD viewing, slightly less adblock usage, and considerably more sponsor support. However, the sheer volume of LoL viewers more than makes up for it, with our CPS results often more than doubling the total numbers SC2 sent in in every category. So far, everything is conforming to my theory of slightly older SC2 fans, although there are several holes in this data that prevent deeper analysis.

In the future, I will be seeking to expand both the depth and the breadth of the survey data, hopefully gaining more information from each person, as well as branching out to many other games and tournaments. If you run a stream or an event that regularly gets over 5,000 viewers and would like to help me out/are curious about your own numbers, I will make, organize, and interpret a survey for you for free. Some details in the spoiler-

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As long as you’re cool with me also using at least some of those numbers in future posts like this, anyway. I am open to almost any competitive game, including but not limited to SC2, Dota 2, World of Tanks, CS:GO, Street Fighter 4, Super Smash Brothers, SMITE, COD, and Quake.

If I ever came across as biased for one community or the other, that's completely unintentional. I tried to keep as balanced a view as possible. Thanks for reading!

Survey Says #2: Income, Viewing, Sponsors

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