OWL Viewership, Twitch Chat, and Meme-Meta Analysis

This article is the answer to questions you never knew you had about Twitch chat and viewership trends. I’m honestly not sure why I spent my entire Sunday working on this ridiculous endeavor, but somehow I am glad that I did.

Twitch is awesome for a number of reasons. Not only does it house great video game content, but it turns watching content into a communal activity rather than a solo one through the wonderful ‘twitch chat’. A few years ago Twitch decided that this communal experience was too precious to limit to only those who could watch events live, and they added twitch chat to VODs as well as live broadcasts. And, because Twitch stores this information on their servers, it means you can download the FULL twitch chat history for any VOD on twitch! So that’s what I did for the OWL matches. Please note that all of the following stats come from exclusively the English language stream because America.

Let’s start off with some highlights. Across the 22 hours and 12 competitive matches in OWL week 1 there were a total of 595,711 non-deleted chats sent on the Overwatchleague broadcast, or roughly 7.5 messages per second. Hilariously, over 8,000 of those messages were people trying to redeem watching rewards that did not yet exist (!token or !reward spam). There were a total of 127,302 unique viewers who sent chats, but the most prolific chatter of all was of course moobot.

Moobot was hard at work during OWL, sending a total of 5,174 different messages. To see exactly what you unruly bunch made moobot do, here you go.

Breakdown of the different mod messages sent by Moobot over OWL week 1

The next most prolific Chatters, seen below, were less active than moobot, but still posted an impressive number of chats. My personal favorite is the legend ‘Slay_By’ who posted a total of 752 chats, all but 1 of which contained LUL. That sort of dedication is not within my understanding, but it certainly earns my respect

Chat Leaderboards

Pog Champ Heat Map — Fans will argue which game of the week was the most hype, but I can try to address that argument scientifically. If you assume that the concentration of Pogchamps is indicative of hype moments, then maybe you can say the game with the most Pogchamps per message on average would be the most hype. The chart below answers this question. Not surprisingly our Fuse-Lords had the highest Pogchamp concentration in our match vs Houston at over 8% of the chats sent containing at least one pogchamp.

Pog Champ & LuL by game

For those of you wondering what the most used terms were overall, here is a quick wordcloud made from combining the chats from all games played — the word cloud displays the top 200 words, size relative to use. I’m not sure what ‘coolstorybob’ is but clearly it must be important to have made it into the wordcloud.