Familiar faces dominate the top while new challengers continue to rise.
Image from lolesports.com
In February, fans watched 5.02 billion minutes of League on Twitch, up 5.9% from 4.74 billion in January despite three fewer days in the month. That total was spread across 153,253 different channels, down 5.8% from 162,701 in January. Even as Twitch viewers watched more LoL, it was spread out over fewer broadcasters. There are probably multiple reasons for this (such as the short month), but one sticks out more than others: Riot’s own content.
rito pls
Even with only 7 LCS days in January, Riot captured over 19% of all League viewership for the month. With 16 LCS days between EU and NA, and the LPL and Challenger series on top of that, Riot took 31% of all viewer attention in February. This is equivalent to the viewership of the top 14 non-Riot channels combined or all but the top 27 independent streams.
So while the LCS brings high quality games and great production values, it appears to cut down on content diversity slightly. On the plus side, this should separate the good streamers from the great streamers.
Most Popular Streamers (Highest Average Viewer Count)
Most of the list remains in similar positions as last month as 10 out of 11 made the list again. Bjergsen remains king of average viewer count for the third month in a row, and only Sneaky fell off to #12 while Froggen leaped to the #10 position.
Imaqtpie held steady in the #2 spot, but Doublelift is close to matching his averages after posting major gains in each of the last two months (in December, Liftlift maintained 14,500 viewers for the month but broke 20,000 in February). However, this may be a somewhat artificial rise because of his scarcity due to the LCS. In January, he streamed for 75 hours, but only broadcasted 44 this past month. Compare this to Qtpie’s 272 and 243 hours in the same months, and it should be easy to see where the relative scarcity might drive up viewership among Doublelift’s fans.
Highest Peak Viewer Counts
Just like the average viewer count, Bjergsen is number one on the peak viewer count as well, setting a new high since I began recording these stats in December. Imaqtpie became just the second broadcaster to peak at over 50,000 viewers and came just shy of 60,000.
Looking at these numbers, it would seem as though the best time to peak is between 2 PM and 5 PM (PST) when Europeans are going to sleep and North Americans are beginning finish school or work. Some streamers, like Voyboy and Sneaky, have done very well on the graveyard shift, but they’re in the minority on this list. This is something that probably deserves a more in-depth look in the future.
Most Watched Streams
While Bjergsen may have the top spot on the other two charts, Qtpie has maintained his hold on this one for three months in a row as well. He remains the only individual to surpass 5 million viewer hours in a month since I began recording these stats. Nightblue3, his closest competitor for the last two months, cut the margin significantly by increasing his average viewer count 30% and streaming 12 extra hours.
As the LCS season wears on, the pros on those teams have dropped a bit on this list as they’re streaming less and scrimming more. With that said, it shouldn’t be surprising to see Piglet climb over 40 spots on this chart, given that he has much more time to stream with Keith in the Team Liquid starting line-up.
Rising Stars
Often, it’s not hard to predict who is at the top of the charts now because they’re frequently the first or second stream on the page. One benefit of this data is being able to see who is in the process of climbing toward the top. All of the streamers listed below had at least 50% more viewer hours than in January, and they don’t seem to be slowing down.
It may be cheating a bit to list Tabzz on here given that he’s played in two World Championships, but he just started streaming again last month, and has brought a lot of pain to solo queue with his Kalista and Fizz.
RFLegendary has attracted many more viewers as he’s climbed the Challenger leaderboard (#7 at the time of this writing). Frostfire_Annie, perhaps better known as Annie Bot, will play Annie in any lane and goes through every Annie skin in the process.
MachineGunnerUSMC is a jungle main who loves Warwick and hates Evelynn. And MissCoookiez will mix in games of League with streaming her creation of art and a variety of other games.
There’s a lot more that could be said about all of those streamers, but you should check them out while there’s still some hipster credibility to be gained, so you can tell your children that you watched them before they had a sneaker contract and Amazon’s robots took over Twitch.
Data & Closing Thoughts
If you’d like to find out where you or someone else landed on the charts, you can view full rankings on these Google Docs:
If you’re interested in the raw data, I’ll post it later this week, so follow me on Twitter so you can download it once it’s posted along with the same info on Hearthstone.
