Top 50 streamers in October 2013 (+ WCS numbers)

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Conti

Germany2516 Posts

November 01 2013 16:45 GMT

Welcome this month's edition of the top 50 streamers list.

Table of contents

Huh? What's this?
Top 50 streamers in October 2013
The big picture
WCS
GSTL vs. ATC
Older entries

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.

Also also, go and check out Fuzic! Stijn created the awesome looking website with all kinds of stream viewership data. It's much better suited for immediate numbers and analyzing numbers from singular events. Also, it's way prettier than anything I could've ever design. (Note that his project is completely independent from mine, so if you have any questions about it, please ask him and not me.

)

Now, Without further ado, here's this month's tables:

(HTML version here)

[image loading]

(HTML version here)

Stray observations and musings

Congratulations, Destiny, for taking the number one spot in both lists! Now what does it say about the current state of SC2 when a (probably still) retired player gets more viewers than professional SC2 players? Does that mean that the fans prefer an entertainer over a professional? Or did Destiny just bring his regular fanbase over to SC2? Well, we can count out the latter: Last month, Destiny got an average of ~2000 viewers when playing LoL, over 1000 less than his average SC2 viewership. So his good viewer numbers cannot be explained by his fan base alone. Perhaps a more light hearted, entertaining approach to streaming is just what the people want to see.
Grubby, TaeJa and White-Ra are the losers of last month, all losing a considerable amount of viewers.
HuK gained a good amount, on the other hand, more than doubling his average viewership. Destiny also gained more than 500 viewers, of course.
Congratulations to avilo, who finally managed to achieve his goal to get featured here on TL, and immediately climbed 16 spots on this month's list.
Livinpink is the highest ranked streamer this time who is not yet featured. However, her numbers are from only one streaming session, and I am not 100% sure if she was actually playing during it, or perhaps casting some event. So if anyone actually happens to know what exactly she was streaming on the 5th/6th in the last month, please let me know!
Also, thank you desRow for suggesting to include a "hour diff" column in the V*H table.
Here's some information on some of the lesser known names in the lists:
- Hui:Hui is a Taiwanese player who is mostly playing in the TeSL. His fanbase seems to be found mostly outside of teamliquid and in the Taiwanese community, unsurprisingly.
- Tara Babcock: She's an, ahem, model. Google her.
- KingCobra: He's a Russian streamer and commentator, mostly playing daily and weekly cups.
Notable absentees last month: Bomber, NaNiwa, Polt, Sen, StarDust, and Thorzain.
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

(The actual numbers are not important, it's the ratio between month that's important.)

Note that these are player streams only.

There's not a whole lot to say here, as there has been very little change these past few months. Player streams are still significantly less popular ever since WCS kicked in, and I've hypothesized about the reasons for this in the last month's entry.

So let's have a look at the overall stream views instead. That includes players, casters and events, both major and minor. Note that I only include data from April 2013 onwards here, because the data from before then is incomplete (Major tournaments used to not stream on twitch or hide their live viewer numbers in general).

(The actual numbers are not important, it's the ratio between month that's important.)

As you can see, things do not look quite as doom and gloom here. Overall, the stream viewer numbers have been stable in the last couple of months, with the exception of a dip in numbers in September. Non-player streams seem to do reasonably well overall, so it really does appear that the viewers have migrated from watching player streams to watching, for the most part, WCS. Now whether that's a good thing or not probably depends a lot on whether you are a player making money from WCS, or from being a streamer..

WCS

The usual caveats applies:

The numbers are only from twitch.tv.
That means: No numbers from anyone watching on gomtv.net.
No numbers from Chinese streaming sites.
When there are multiple streams for one event, I will add them up only if they are different language streams. If they are the same language (OSL/GSL), I pick the stream with the higher average viewership.

Of course the really interesting numbers here are the WCS finals numbers. An average of ~64500 viewers is probably not quite as much as some would have hoped. We've had multiple big events in the past with >100.000 peak viewers, and the WCS finals did not even came close to a peak like that with a peak viewership of ~80.000. Let's have a closer look:

(Image courtesy of fuzic. Check out the full page here.)

As you can see, the viewership of the final day of the WCS finals has been quite stable. That's odd, considering that more people ought to be more interested in watching the grand final rather than the round of 8 of even the semi finals. It's easy to assume that the finals simply were not very interesting, but I'm fairly certain that this was not the case.

I've explained previously that by far the biggest audience for SC2 streams can be found in Europe. And the finals were held in Canada, at a time zone that was not quite ideal for the European viewership. My assumption therefore is that the Europeans having to go to bed (instead of watching the grand final at 3am in the morning) cancelled out the heightened interest in the grand final, leading to a stable viewership overall.

On the second day, viewership actually steadily declined during the event. Again, it's quite unlikely that the event was so horrid that people just stopped watching. If you want the maximum number of viewers, stream at a time convenient for Europeans. It's as simple as that.

GSTL vs. ATC

Not a whole lot to say here. ATC season 2 is doing quite well, while the GSTL is struggling somewhat.

So that's all for this month.
Hope you guys enjoyed, as always. Any kind of feedback is always welcome!

Older entries

Aeromi

France14456 Posts

November 01 2013 16:48 GMT

Amazing work !

Kerence

Sweden1817 Posts

November 01 2013 16:55 GMT

On November 02 2013 01:45 Conti wrote:
I've explained previously that by far the biggest audience for SC2 streams can be found in Europe. And the finals were held in Canada, at a time zone that was not quite ideal for the European viewership. My assumption therefore is that the Europeans having to go to bed (instead of watching the grand final at 3am in the morning)

Yeah, I don't know about anyone else, but I left after the 1-0 during the finals, and that gave me about 4 hours of sleep. I would have liked to see the rest live, but 4 hours is already pushing it.

On November 02 2013 01:45 Conti wrote:
If you want the maximum number of viewers, stream at a time convenient for Europeans. It's as simple as that.

Yes please! (Of course, it obviously doesn't work like that, and it would hardly be fair to everyone else.)

I've been reading these pretty much every month since you started, so I'll take this opportunity to thank you for your work, I find these stats to be pretty interesting.

Superiorwolf

United States5509 Posts

November 01 2013 17:41 GMT

As always thanks for compiling these lists

Rickyvalle21

United States320 Posts

November 01 2013 17:41 GMT

Finally we have stablized!

iNcontroL

USA29055 Posts

November 01 2013 17:44 GMT

Thanks as always!

Sufinsil

United States760 Posts

November 01 2013 17:53 GMT

Hopefully the west coast time of BlizzCon will help europe viewers some.

Tuczniak

1561 Posts

November 01 2013 17:56 GMT

Destiny gogo.

Nebuchad

Switzerland12155 Posts

November 01 2013 18:02 GMT

ProTech streamed 387 hours?

Holytornados

United States1022 Posts

November 01 2013 18:07 GMT

#10

Love the work here. Good job.

iMOOrtal

Canada144 Posts

November 01 2013 18:15 GMT

#11

Maybe change Artosis to ttesports instead of casting archon? Both are valid, but it's probably best to swap that?

edit: Top 100 Sexiest Streamers:

Mr Robinson x100

desRow

Canada2654 Posts

November 01 2013 21:12 GMT

#12

I'm glad you came back with the total amount of viewers for both tournaments and personal streams, sc2 is doing well now if we can get WCS to lay off the around the clock streaming to give personal streamers a chance, this would be perfect

!

Thanks again for your posts!

EDIT: I gifted you gold for including the overall sc2 numbers graph

Greendotz

United Kingdom2053 Posts

November 01 2013 22:27 GMT

#13

Small criticism. On the “total SC2 stream viewers by month” graph perhaps you could choose contrasting colours as opposed to ‘pink’ and ‘a marginally lighter shade of pink’

. Aside from that great work as always.