ESL Stream Stats Featuring Cowsep, Keane, and SaintVicious

As promised in the last edition of League of Legends Stream Stats, we’re going to look into the stream numbers of two large events hosted by ESL and how they effected some of the participants afterwards.

IEM San Jose

IEM events are always huge productions with huge followings. After the weekend of December 6-7, ESL can boast about:

• 15.5 hours of coverage
• 2,640,813 viewer hours
• 170,375 average viewers

That average viewer count includes the time between matches (although not the time before/after the show). Here’s what those average viewer counts looked like by game:

As you might expect, the largest audience on day 1 was for the TSM vs UoL series. On day 2, it was much closer as game 1 of the finals barely beat out the grudge match between SaintVicious and HotshotGG. This proves the theory that Korean-style casting makes everything better, especially ARAM.

Moove Over, Jungle Meta

There were many good storylines from IEM San Jose. But stuck in between discussions of the Santorin’s first performance on TSM and the seesaw battle between NA and EU, there were the surprising picks from Unicorns of Love. No one did more to throw off the ranked ladder than Kikis when he chose Twisted Fate as his jungler.

While UoL smirked after the pick, everyone else went crazy, not knowing what just happened. Twitch chat erupted into slightly more chaos than usual. As the world stood and wondered, one man dropped a knowledge bomb on us all.

Kobe identified Cowsep as a pioneer of TF jungle, resulting in a few frantic searches for “Who is Cowsep?”. Consequently, you would expect that a shout-out in front of 200,000 people would result in a few more people watching his stream.

While it appears as though Cowsep did receive a bump in viewership starting on the 9th (compared to the December 6-8), it’s not as though there’s a unmistakable spike afterwards. In fact, Cowsep’s largest day came on the 5th, prior to IEM San Jose.

Whatever change in viewership he may have experienced is dwarfed by normal fluctuations (like his peak prior to the tournament) as well as his quick, continued growth in popularity. To put it in context, during the first half of November, Cowsep averaged about 1,300 viewers at a time, but that number skyrocketed to 4,665 for the entire month of December.

North American LCS Expansion stats

The finals and semi-finals took place over three days, from December 12-14. It racked up:

• 21.5 hours of coverage
• 2,206,749 viewer hours
• 102,481 average viewers

As before, that average viewer count includes the time between matches but not the time before the games. While it didn’t grab quite as many eyeballs as IEM San Jose, the final matches of the NA LCS Expansion drew a large audience as well. Considering the difference in star power between teams like TSM or Alliance versus F5 or Coast, I’d think ESL would be quite happy with the numbers. To break it down by game:

Interestingly, the most watched game wasn’t the finale between Coast and Fusion. It was actually the deciding game 4 between Fusion and Curse Academy. It’s a very small difference though, and it shouldn’t be too surprising since both games had LCS spots on the line, and those two teams held the largest fan bases if Reddit comments are to be believed (those games being played on the weekend probably didn’t hurt either). Both those games had almost 15% more viewers than the next two most viewed games (CST vs FSN, games 3 and 4), also potential series-clinching games.

Expanded Viewer Counts for Curse Academy players?

After compiling December’s stats, I noticed that most streams with the highest average viewer counts were current or past LCS players (Nightblue3 and Sp4zie excepted). With that in mind, I was curious if there was an immediate of impact securing an LCS berth on the expansion teams’ players.

Of the two teams who qualified (Coast and Gravity, then Curse Academy), I could only find two players who streamed on Twitch both before and after the tournament: Keane and SaintVicious.

Although they both saw increased viewer counts after the tournament, Keane saw a much larger increase than SaintVicious. Those numbers work out to a 4% increase for Saint and a 121% increase for Keane. It’s possible that the effect may be more pronounced for Keane since SaintVicious already had a large following and didn’t have a pick as recognizable as Keane’s Hecarim.

Full Leaderboards and Data Downloads

For anyone interested in looking up where their favorite streamer ranks in some of the charts from the first streamer stats article, or for those who want to explore the raw data themselves, I’ll be releasing all the data from these articles under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. The full data dumps for December will be available next week, but in the mean time, here is the data from this article and the previous LoL stats article:

December 2014 Stats

• Average viewer counts
• Peak viewer counts
• Total hours streamed
• Total viewer hours

ESL Stats

• ESL stats, including IEM San Jose, IEM Cologne, and both EU and NA LCS Expansion data.
• Cowsep stats
• SaintVicious & Keane stats

You can also set up your own instances of the program which grabs this data from Twitch by visiting GitHub.

Next week, we’ll apply some of these numbers to estimate how much a top streamer can make in ad revenue.