EPT
This month's edition will be a bit different, as there are barely any WCS numbers to talk about. Well, other than the grand finals, of course. Which (Warning, spoiler!) peaked at about ~150k viewers. So instead of the usual, I'll present my thoughts on the changes for next year's WCS, and what it might mean in regards to viewer numbers. Feel free to let me know if you guys would like more stuff like that in the future.
Table of contents
- Huh? What's this?
- Top 50 streamers in November 2013
- The big picture
- WCS thoughts
- 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:
![[image loading]](https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8028950/TL/top%2050%202013%2011.png)
![[image loading]](https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8028950/TL/top%2050%202013%2011x.png)
Stray observations and musings
- Destiny has been dethroned! The tyrant himself, Jaedong, leads this month's list with a comfortable lead over Destiny, almost doubling his average viewers.
- On the other hand, no one beats Destiny when it comes to the V*H ranking. Streaming for almost 200 hours and still having ~3500 viewers on average is mightily impressive.
- INnoVation has been streaming, and he unsurprisingly did pretty well.
- Another legend that started streaming was Stork. His numbers are not quite as impressive, which does make the BW fan in me kind of sad. But to be realistic, he has been quite underwhelming in SC2 so far, with no results of note in his name. Let's hope he will return to his former glory and dethrone Jaedong as the eternal 2nd place finisher.
- HuK pretty much lost all the viewers he gained in the previous month. But he only streamed a handful of hours, so I wouldn't read too much into that.
- I am going to include everybody's favorite guy Nathanias in the rankings from now on, as he's actually playing a good bit on his stream these days. Even though it's going to be a bitch to exclude the viewer numbers from his casts done on the same stream each month.
- 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.- PsY is "an American Zerg player and YouTuber", says Liquipedia. And who am I to distrust Liquipedia?
- Notable absentees last month: Nerchio, TaeJa (too busy making money), Snute, LucifroN, San, Socke, SaSe.
- 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%2011.png)
(The actual numbers are not important, it's the ratio between month that's important.)
Note that these are player streams only. Also note that matplotlib doesn't like me and creates way too much white space for some reason. Halp.
For our player streamers, things are looking a little better. November saw very little WCS action (other than the grand finals, of course), and thus there was more breathing room for other events and streamers to shine.
There won't be any WCS at all this month, so the trend might continue. Of course, it's also December, and so there's always Christmas and New Year's in the way, so my guess is that we still might see a dip in numbers next month, both due to lower interest in streams, but also due to less streams being available. Players got to open their presents, too.
Overall stream views
![[image loading]](https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8028950/TL/Monthly%20viewers%202013%2011 all.png)
(The actual numbers are not important, it's the ratio between month that's important.)
Overall, things look pretty stable. You might have expected a noticeable jump due to the WCS grand finals, but one event usually does not have that much of an impact, even one with a peak of ~150k viewers. In addition, there was barely any other WCS event going on in November.
Speaking of which, the plans for WCS are out by now, and they've certainly been discussed to death by now here, on reddit and wherever else people talk passionately about SC2. But I might as well give my take on it, while I'm at it.
I have pointed out numerous times in thesemonthly threads that there is so much WCS content that it is easily drowning out both other events (who often had a hard time finding a good date for their events that would not conflict with anything WCS) as well as player streams (player stream numbers tank as soon as a WCS even was on, and more often than not, there was a WCS event on practically every day).
Apparently Blizzard has a similar view, and so they are going to reduce the number of streaming days (down to perhaps 2 a week per region) as well as getting rid of the local season finals. I'm with the majority on this that this is a very good move, and that this most definitely will give everyone outside of WCS some breathing room to get some attention from you, the viewer. And due to that, I fully expect the player streams to slowly gain more viewers again over time (at least compared to the overall SC2 viewer rate, I dare not make any assumptions about the game's popularity itself).
However, I remain curious and/or skeptical about what this will do to the overall viewer numbers. Sure, a streamer can just turn on his stream and start playing when there's no WCS on a given day. But it's not quite as simple to organize, produce and host a full event when there's no WCS on a given weekend. It's unlikely that we'll be getting MLG back just because there will be less potential scheduling problems next year. WCS was omnipresent this year, at times hurting other events. Next year, WCS will leave a bit of a void, and it will not be a given that said void will be automatically (re)filled by other events again.
But then again, maybe it will. I'd like to think that I'm more of a "the glass is half full" kind of guy, and this is certainly an opportunity for new events to step in (Hi, Red Bull!) and show that there can be a successful scene outside of WCS.
GSTL vs. ATC
![[image loading]](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8028950/TL/GSTL%20ATC%2011.png)
Not a whole lot to say here. ATC numbers are still varying quite a bit, depending on who is playing and who is casting, while the GSTL finals had the same fate as pretty much every other Korean team league finals. Us foreigners are just more interested in individual leagues.
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 October 2013 (+ WCS numbers)
- Top 50 streamers in September 2013 (+ WCS numbers)
- Top 50 streamers in August 2013 (plus WCS numbers)
- Top 50 streamers in July 2013 (plus WCS numbers)
- Top 50 streamers in June 2013 (plus WCS numbers)
- Top 50 streamers in May 2013 (plus WCS numbers)
- Top 50 streamers in April 2013 (+ WCS/GSTL/SPL!)
- Top 50 streamers in March 2013 (HotS numbers!)
- Top 50 streamers in February 2013 + Proleague/GSL
- 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)
