EPT
The poll from last month was surprisingly unambiguous. Over 90% of you want me to post all the numbers I have in one thread, even if they're not exactly related, so that's exactly what you'll get.
You'll get the top 50 streamer list(s) as well as this month's GSL and Proleague viewer numbers. Since people have been asking for other tournament numbers, I'm also including IPTL numbers this time around. Another request was to graph the average viewers by hour of the day, and I've finally gotten around to do that! My apologies to desrow for taking so long. 
Table of contents
- Huh? What's this?
- Top 50 streamers in February 2013
- The big picture
- Average viewers by hour of the day
- Proleague vs. GSL
- IPTL numbers
- A poll!
- Older entries
Huh? What's this?
For those of you who don't already know what this is about: I'm gathering various data from all the streams that are presented on teamliquid.net (viewers, game, events, etc.) and use that data to produce the pretty tables you see below. The tables only contain SC2 players (that is, people streaming games of Starcraft 2 being played by the streamer themselves) and not casters, teams or other streams. The tables also only contain Starcraft 2 related activities. So CatZ streaming Dota2 will not be taken into account, for instance.
For live stream data, go and visit soiii's site http://sc2streamnumbers.com/ where you can check out detailed graphs of stream viewers of every stream. (Thread here). Please check it out, it's pretty awesome. I thought about doing something like that at some point, but soiii did it way better and prettier than I could've ever done.
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. And "HotS%" is the percentage of Heart of the Swarm streaming compared to Wings of Liberty. A full green bar means the player streamed only HotS, a grey bar means he only streamed WoL.
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:
![[image loading]](https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8028950/TL/top%2050%202013%2002.png)
![[image loading]](https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8028950/TL/top%2050%202013%2002x.png)
Stray observations
- You see all that green there? Yep, HotS is coming. In fact, a lot of the time, players simply forgot to switch from WoL to HotS in their interface (I'm looking at you, Stephano!), so the database read their HotS games as WoL. So the actual HotS playing rate is even higher.
- Speaking of him, Stephano still played a lot of WoL last month, since that's what he's been playing in Proleague and GSL. That visibly hurt his viewer numbers, which are down by over 2000. That's still enough for the #1 spot, however.
- Congrats to Grubby for streaming a ton and beating Hui and becoming #1 in the viewers*hours category.
- Someone tell Nerchio to set his race as Zerg in the streaming interface.
- Notable absentees this month: Scarlett, Bomber, Lucifron, Creator, MKP, Oz, Gumiho.
- 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%202013%2002.png)
(The actual numbers are not important, it's the ratio between month that's important.)
HotS is one month away, and it's already fully dominating WoL, no doubt about it. The overall numbers are down a little, but February is a short month, so there's no need to worry.
Next month's numbers will be quite interesting. Not relevant, but interesting. The beta ended, and even if Blizzard gives the pros something akin to a private beta, it's doubtful whether they will stream as much, since there will be way less people to play against. Even if the pros will switch back to WoL for two weeks, the viewers will most likely not follow. So next month will most likely see a drop in overall viewership initially, followed by a huge surge once HotS is released. Interesting times.
Average viewers by hour of the day
![[image loading]](https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8028950/TL/Viewers_by_hour.png)
These are the average viewer numbers from last month (only players, no casters and events) by hour of the day. Note that these numbers only contain streams that have appeared in my top 50 lists (since I have categorized those as players and non-players), which roughly equates to all player streams that average >300 viewers. I'm fairly certain that excluding the other player streams would not change the above graph in any noticeable way.
The average viewers are in blue, and the number of unique streams are in red. "Number of unique streams" means the total number of streams that streamed at that specific time of the day at least once in the last month.
Just looking at the average viewers, we see a clear rise in viewership during the European evening and the early evening in the East Coast, while the numbers are lowest while most of us Europeans are sleeping.
Without the number of unique streams, the graph turns into a bit of a chicken and egg problem: Are the average viewer numbers the highest at 5pm EST because that's when all the most popular streamers stream, or are they the highest because that's when there are the most possible viewers?
That's what the number of unique streams are for: We can see that during the European evening, the amount of unique streams roughly corresponds to the average viewership. During the EU nights and East Coast late evening, however, the amount of streams stays mostly constant (most likely consisting of US players), while the average viewership falls sharply.
To me that looks like the majority of stream viewers can be found in Europe, while player streams are not nearly as popular in the US.
Proleague vs. GSL
Please take the GSL numbers below with a large grain of salt. The numbers below only reflect the twitch.tv viewer numbers, and do not count viewers that have watched GSL straight from gomtv.net. There have been quite some lag issues with the twitch.tv stream last month, so often times people have been switching to the gomtv.net stream. So if there's a GSL stream with very low viewer numbers, it's highly likely that most of the viewers simply went to gomtv.net to watch instead.
In addition, as always, the numbers below only reflect the official English streams of the corresponding events, and say nothing about Korean viewerships.
And before anyone's asking, no, I do not have GSTL Preseason viewer numbers, as teamliquid linked to gomtv.net instead of the twitch.tv stream. Sorry.
If anyone from TL.net could change that for the upcoming GSTL, that'd be awesome!![[image loading]](https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8028950/TL/Proleague%20GSL%202013%2002.png)
Not much to say here. GSL is still more popular than Proleague.
IPTL viewer numbers
Since people have been asking for other tournament numbers, I've decided on IPTL for this month, since there's a nice number of streams to list. It's not just this month's numbers, but all IPTL numbers for the current season.
Again, please take these numbers with a grain of salt. They're not 100% accurate, for various reasons. For one, very short shows can give me too few datapoints to be useful, so a hypothetical all-kill of only ZvZs would be very bad for me. Another thing that can happen is that someone simply forgets to take the event off the TL calendar after it's done, and my database continues to count very low viewer numbers (everyone who didn't bother closing the stream) towards the average. I can catch some of those things happening, but it's impossible to catch 'em all.
![[image loading]](https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8028950/TL/IPTL_2013_02.png)
I'd be happy to include other event numbers as well, but I'm not sure which to pick, so I need some help here. Do feel free to make suggestions on what event numbers you want to see!
It's not quite as easy as it initially sounds, though, since there are various parameters to consider:
- Premier events (MLG, IEM, IPL (R.I.P.)) are out for the most part because they do not publish their viewer numbers in the first place.
- Short events (<1 hour per show) are out because I won't have enough datapoints to give useful viewer numbers. The MLG Showdowns are a good example of that.
- In addition, it should be something that happens regularly, so I get enough stuff to compare. Otherwise I'll just end up presenting a bar-chart with 1 or 2 bars.
- Oh, and the event should be decently popular, too, of course.
So that's all for this month.
Hope you guys enjoyed, as always. Any kind of feedback is always welcome!
Older entries
- Top 50 streamers in Jan.2013+Proleague/GSL viewers
- Top 50 streamers in Dec 2012 (plus Top 100 2012!*)
- Top 50 streamers in November 2012
- Top 50 streamers in October 2012
- Top 50 streamers in September 2012
- Top 50 streamers in August 2012
- Top 50 streamers in July 2012
- Top 50 streamers in June 2012
- Top 50 streamers in May 2012
- Who is the most popular streamer?(Numbers inside!) (March-April 2012)
