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Welcome this month's edition of the top 50 streamers list. 
Twitch.tv is slowly getting some serious competition in the form of azubu.tv and mlg.tv. Competition is always good, of course, and with Youtube buying out twitch there will undoubtedly be some changes coming up for us. But, unfortunately, neither azubu nor mlg offer APIs for their streaming platforms right now, restricting the information I can gather.
In short, anything I present below does not contain any data from azubu.tv or mlg.tv. That means I am missing some big player streams (Tastosis, MC, Hyun, Bomber, Mvp, NesTea, etc.), as well as some regular events (MLG qualifiers, Shoutcraft Clan Wars). Please keep that in mind. There's nothing I can do about this situation, unfortunately, and it won't change until the two platforms start offering APIs for their services.
Table of contents
Huh? What's this?
For those of you who don't already know what this is about: I'm gathering various data (viewers, game, events, etc.) from all the streams that are presented on teamliquid.net (those that you can in the sidebar to your right) and use that data to produce the pretty tables and graphs you see below. The tables only contain SC2 players (that is, streams of people playing games of Starcraft 2) and not casters, teams or other streams. The tables also only contain Starcraft 2 related activities. So, for instance when CatZ is streaming Dota2, it will not be taken into account.
The data I gather is then turned into the tables you see below. One is sorted by the average viewers, the other is sorted by the average viewers times the hours streamed. The latter table favors those that stream a lot, while the former table favors popular streamers regardless of how much they stream. Either ranking has its advantages and disadvantages, and thus I present both.
For either table, I have a minimum required stream time of 5 hours to be included in the list.
The list
Due to space limitations, I have to shorten the headers and leave some data out of the tables presented here. You can get the full tables from the links below.
The headers aren't as clear as I'd like them to be thanks to this, so here's a quick explanation, just in case: "Viewers" denotes the average viewers in the given month. "Hours" are the hours played. "Place diff" and "Viewer diff" are the place and viewer differences compared to last month.
Also, the HTML version linked beneath the images has some more information that I had to leave out due to space limitation, most notably the featured status of the players.
Now, Without further ado, here's this month's tables:
Stray observations and musings
- Well, at least now we can stop arguing about whether Stephano is retired or not. His move to Meltdown gaming did not hurt his viewer numbers at all. He didn't stream all that much, but as always, he remains the most popular SC2 streamer around.
- And just like last month, Winter easily takes the number one spot to in the viewers*hours category. Not only that, but he continues to steadily gain a healthy amount of viewers, coming in third in the viewers category. Congrats again!
- Here's some information on some of the lesser known names in the lists:
 Balloon is a Korean random player who has found a bit of a fanbase over at reddit, among other things thanks to the achievement of being the top of the Korean ladder while playing random, which sure is quite an impressive feat.
- Journey is a former SKT1 terran player. He never had any big results, making it to Code A a few times.
- Notable absentees last month: Grubby (probably preparing for his WCS matches), Demuslim, jjakji, Thorzain, Crank.
- If you find any mistakes or errors in the lists, please do let me know, especially concerning team changes or players that you are absolutely sure should be on the lists, but are not.
The big picture
![[image loading]](https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8028950/TL/Monthly%20viewers%202014%2005.png) (The actual numbers are not important, it's the ratio between month that's important.)
Note that these are player streams only.
Player stream numbers have recovered slightly compared to the previous month.
As I said in the introduction, these numbers do not include data from azubu.tv, which means that streamers like MC, mvp, Hyun, Bomber and others are not accounted for. On Twitch, they used to get pretty good numbers when they streamed, so the overall player stream numbers might look a good bit better than what we see above. Unfortunately, there's no way of knowing this for sure.
Overall stream views
![[image loading]](https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8028950/TL/Monthly%20viewers%202014%2005 all.png) (The actual numbers are not important, it's the ratio between month that's important.)
Pretty much the same can be said for the overall stream numbers as above: They recovered slightly, and they do not contain all the viewer numbers as all data from mlg.tv is missing. So no Shoutcraft Clan Wars, and no MLG qualifiers. Neither events are that big, so it's not that much of a problem, yet. But soon we will have a proper premier MLG event, and those numbers will most likely be missing from my data as well. It's quite possible that I will retire this graph at that point, since it might be quite misleading if the data is missing premier event viewer numbers.
WCS/GSL
WCS numbers are largely steady, with WCS EU taking the lead, as always, hovering a bit over ~20.000 viewers on average for most of their events, while WCS AM and GSL are on equal terms in terms of viewership.
Proleague & ATC
Proleague viewership remains roughly above 10.000 viewers on average, remaining quite popular. ATC isn't quite doing as well, but then again, there's been ATC matches going on pretty much every day in the last month, and considering that, the numbers haven't been that bad.
That's all for this month. Hope you guys enjoyed, as always. Any kind of feedback is always welcome!
Older entries
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wtf 366 hours streamed by neuroswarm o.0
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Canada16217 Posts
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Due to the amount of viewbotting going on with Winter, it seems disingenuous to not at least mention the possibility that these numbers could be wildly off.
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hmm yeah if the player with most hours has viewbots (has it been confirmed either way yet?) then that would lower the numbers a lot I'd imagine
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I thought people with viewbots get auto-banned.
At least that's how it works on YouTube.
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viewbotting? twitch is a professional company, wouldn't they have a handle on that sort of thing?
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On June 02 2014 04:05 castleeMg wrote:
viewbotting? twitch is a professional company, wouldn't they have a handle on that sort of thing?
The other day I saw a girl on twitch streaming minecraft
She alone had 110k viewers (more than LoL)
I immediately thought something improper was going on there, but it was just nothing much :D
Then people were saying in the chat that that was viewbotting, or something like that
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Canada16217 Posts
On June 02 2014 04:02 urboss wrote:
I thought people with viewbots get auto-banned.
At least that's how it works on YouTube.
If someones being view-botted it doesn't mean their doing it, as it could be someone that doesn't like Winter.
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On June 02 2014 03:37 TotalBiscuit wrote:
Due to the amount of viewbotting going on with Winter, it seems disingenuous to not at least mention the possibility that these numbers could be wildly off.
Or maybe people like his content?
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On June 02 2014 04:31 The_Red_Viper wrote:Show nested quote +On June 02 2014 03:37 TotalBiscuit wrote:
Due to the amount of viewbotting going on with Winter, it seems disingenuous to not at least mention the possibility that these numbers could be wildly off. Or maybe people like his content?
You are acting like this is somehow up for discussion. It's not, he has been viewbotted, his numbers are wildly inconsistent with large gains and drops over the course of short periods of time. The only way this happens is if you have been viewbotted. As to who is responsible, that can't be confirmed. Streams get viewbotted all the time, but Winters stream is frequently affected by this. His social media metrics don't match up with his streaming numbers either, which is another clue that indicates viewbotting is going on. He is still relatively popular, more so than most progamers, but to suggest he has not been subject to viewbotting is disconnected from reality.
viewbotting? twitch is a professional company, wouldn't they have a handle on that sort of thing?
As opposed to an amateur company? O_o Twitch can't do anything about it other than take the channel down, which considering most viewbotting occurs outside of the streamers control, is not something you should be doing.
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China6328 Posts
You deserve a star for this dude. Also for what it's worth Winter is definitely highly suspicious of viewbotting.
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View botting is usually not under the control of the streamer, but under the control of viewers who want negative consequences to occur.
Thanks for the info as always dude!
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On June 02 2014 04:11 Ace Frehley wrote:Show nested quote +On June 02 2014 04:05 castleeMg wrote:
viewbotting? twitch is a professional company, wouldn't they have a handle on that sort of thing? The other day I saw a girl on twitch streaming minecraft She alone had 110k viewers (more than LoL) I immediately thought something improper was going on there, but it was just nothing much :D Then people were saying in the chat that that was viewbotting, or something like that
I saw the same thing with some random guy going up to 23k that played Super Meat Boy and normally has 1k viewers.
He realized it himself and stopped playing trying to fix it, after a few minutes it was back to normal.
I thought that this was some twitch glitch at the time.
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In response to some of the comments above: Viewbotting is very real, and it does happen. It's not as trivial to detect as one might imagine (depending on how smart the viewbotting services are), and people (talking about twitch streamers here, not specifically SC2 streamers) have streamed for weeks or even month while blatantly viewbotting before they got banned.
On June 02 2014 03:37 TotalBiscuit wrote:
Due to the amount of viewbotting going on with Winter, it seems disingenuous to not at least mention the possibility that these numbers could be wildly off.
First of all, get well soon, TB! There's few people who have done as much for the community as you have.
Back on topic: I considered to mention this, yes. But I ultimately decided against it after reading this post on /r/starcraft, which looked more closely at the numbers and makes a few good points. The TL;DR version of the post is that Winter's viewer/chat user/chat message numbers do not look any different from other popular streamers.
Now of course that does not disprove that Winter (or anyone else) is viewbotting, and I certainly do not know for certain whether he does or does not, just like I don't know that about anyone else. But it's a good read for anyone interested in the issue, and it makes some good points, especially comparing the numbers to other popular streamers.
In addition, I have not seen any circumstantial evidence other than the argument that he is (or was) virtually unknown and yet gets a ton of viewers, and that Winter himself said that he occasionally gets botted by others. If anyone has anything more substantial than that, I'd love to hear it.
I've had a look at my own data and compiled Winter's monthly average, peak viewership and hours streamed:
+ Show Spoiler +Date|Avg. Viewers|Peak|Hours
2012-07|3.01986754966887|11|75
2012-08|2.86363636363636|18|49
2012-09|6.28723404255319|45|94
2012-10|92.70823798627|1446|218
2012-11|14.4970588235294|40|85
2012-12|15.5133689839572|98|93
2013-01|19.3636363636364|135|118
2013-02|54.4929577464789|185|177
2013-03|94.5448798988622|299|197
2013-04|86.1842105263158|193|180
2013-05|70.1375291375291|202|107
2013-06|95.2496194824962|278|164
2013-07|159.374068554396|694|167
2013-08|105.292253521127|241|142
2013-09|113.690909090909|246|123
2013-10|121.870624048706|454|164
2013-11|194.019108280255|962|157
2013-12|544.108137044968|1407|233
2014-01|488.801377726751|2481|217
2014-02|473.30316091954|1142|174
2014-03|554.789351851852|1095|216
2014-04|1392.56911581569|3288|200
2014-05|2145.71169916435|3557|179
As we can see, Winter has been streaming for ages, starting in late 2012. He has put some serious hours into his streaming ever since, and he has streamed for many months with <50 viewers. He started with virtually no viewers, and that viewership grew steadily over the months to what it is now.
Also note that Winter got featured here on teamliquid.net in late April this year. The jump in viewership happened in that month, but before he got featured, so there doesn't seem to be a connection there. The viewership continued to grow after he was featured, of course.
Playing the devil's advocate here: If he is viewbotting, when did he start? In December 2013, when his average viewership grew by ~300 people and then stayed steady for the next 4 months? In April this year when his average viewership more than doubled? Last month, when his average viewership grew by 700 people? Did he spent months slowly increasing his viewbot count to make the rise of viewers seem more natural? I honestly don't know. If he really is viewbotting, he is a very, very smart viewbotter.
Ultimately, I don't know, and the only time I can say with certainty that someone is viewbotting is when it's done in a blatantly obvious way. This is far from an obvious case, however, and with others already having crunched the numbers and coming to no specific conclusion that there might be viewbotting, and my own data giving similar results, I decided not to mention it. Maybe I should have, I'm still not sure.
I might be inclined to change the OP if anyone has a link to a summary of the allegations (plus some evidence, of course). So far I've only found off-hand remarks that he must be viewbotting, and posts defending him in great detail. I would have imagined that there is a reddit post somewhere that says "Winter ist viewbotting, and here's evidence proving it" or something along those lines, but I couldn't find anything. 
Edit: Basically, I don't like to make (or repeat) unsubstantiated allegations. If anyone has any compelling arguments and/or circumstantial evidence for the viewbotting, link/make them here and I'll most likely link them in the OP.
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Regarding Winter, I've been in his stream where he even points out himself how he believes he is being viewbotted (at the time).
I think he would have generally high viewership now anyways, but his viewership numbers seem to spike heavily/randomly. I would be interested to see the data on this, and see how often he gets ~1K more viewers "instantly".
Back on the data, thanks Conti for putting these together, they are always interesting to go over.
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On June 02 2014 04:39 TotalBiscuit wrote:Show nested quote +On June 02 2014 04:31 The_Red_Viper wrote:On June 02 2014 03:37 TotalBiscuit wrote:
Due to the amount of viewbotting going on with Winter, it seems disingenuous to not at least mention the possibility that these numbers could be wildly off. Or maybe people like his content? You are acting like this is somehow up for discussion. It's not, he has been viewbotted, his numbers are wildly inconsistent with large gains and drops over the course of short periods of time. The only way this happens is if you have been viewbotted. As to who is responsible, that can't be confirmed. Streams get viewbotted all the time, but Winters stream is frequently affected by this. His social media metrics don't match up with his streaming numbers either, which is another clue that indicates viewbotting is going on. He is still relatively popular, more so than most progamers, but to suggest he has not been subject to viewbotting is disconnected from reality. Show nested quote +viewbotting? twitch is a professional company, wouldn't they have a handle on that sort of thing? As opposed to an amateur company? O_o Twitch can't do anything about it other than take the channel down, which considering most viewbotting occurs outside of the streamers control, is not something you should be doing.
My problem is that some "famous and important" figureheads of the community act like it is 100% confirmed that he isn't legit.
I can understand that people find it somewhat suspicious, but this "witch-hunt" looks very bad imo.
You can think about his content what you want (only smurfs, blabla), but he produces A LOT of content and people seem to enjoy what he is doing. If the already established people get jealous and spread rumors it is imo pretty sad, get your shit together and produce content people enjoy yourself! (that part isn't about you TB, but other streamers who are vocal about him too)
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its pretty obvious winter has tons of viewbots
without them he has around 200 viewers
it might not be him it could be him doing it
it would be nice if twitch fixed this problem because it is nice to get accurate viewing numbers for everything
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EPT![[image loading]](https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8028950/TL/top%2050%202014%2005.png)
![[image loading]](https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8028950/TL/top%2050%202014%2005x.png)
![[image loading]](https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8028950/TL/WCS%202014%2005.png)
![[image loading]](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8028950/TL/Proleague%20ATC%202014%2005.png)
