Table of contents

Huh? What's this?

The list



(HTML version







(HTML version (HTML version here (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.



, 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.



, and 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.



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.



, 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!



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.)



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

WCS

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.



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

GSTL vs. ATC

Older entries

Welcome this month's edition of the top 50 streamers list.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) andcasters, 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.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, 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:Note that these arestreams 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).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..The usual caveats applies: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: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.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!