The new year brought new patches and a gnarly new meta, but other articles have covered those details. It’s time for something far more exciting: spreadsheets, baby!
Imaqtpie showing off his mad VBA skills. Image originally from lolesports.com.
Totals are taken from Twitch’s public API, so they may be adversely effected by Twitch API downtime or other technical issues. Also, they are based on the month of January according to Greenwich Mean Time, so there may be discrepancies from counts based in other time zones. We’ll focus on individual streamers, so tournament channels will intentionally be left off the charts (sorry, Riot).
Overview
There were 162,701 different channels which broadcasted League of Legends for at least 1 minute in January, up 12.1% from 145,147 in December. Twitch viewers combined to watch LoL for 4.74 billion minutes, a 14.8% increase over December. That works out to 79.1 million viewer hours or 9,027 viewer years. Surprisingly, the increase is not primarily because of the return of the LCS and LPL.
The change in event streams only accounted for 1/6 of the increase in total viewership, so it’s possible that it’s due to both more broadcasters and viewers becoming available after the holidays. The average viewer count was almost unchanged, dropping to 74.9 viewers from 75.2 in December, while the median and mode remained unchanged at 2 viewers and 1 viewer respectively.
Most Dedicated Streamers (Most Hours Streamed)
Congratulations to Pannekakepulver and JapSauce, the only two people to make the chart for both December and January. While these broadcasters don’t have the highest viewer counts, they’ve all dedicated an amazing amount of time to streaming League. If you’re looking for other streams to try out, check some of these people out. There’s a good chance there’s at least one person in your time zone, with broadcasters on this list coming from France, Turkey, and Taiwan amongst other countries.
Among the fan favorites, Cowsep was just off the chart at 15th while streaming for 298.8 hours. Imaqtpie finished 30th with 272.4 hours of broadcast time.
Most Popular Streamers (Highest Average Viewer Count)
Bjergsen comes in number one for the second month in a row. Imaqtpie took the number two spot from WildTurtle, taking top spot out of all AD Carries. Siv jumped up quite significantly, barely falling short of the list last month but taking the third spot in January. Despite the obvious pun opportunity, Sneaky did not sneak onto the list. If you paid attention to Twitch recently, you would have seen him coming.
Also new to the list are brTTÂ and gORDOx. Both are Brazilian, and both barely passed the 8 hour minimum to make the list, but the similarties end there. brTT is the Challenger AD Carry who rejoined paiN Gaming in January, while gORDOx has done some time in Bronze 5Â while casting and streaming other games as well.
Largest Peak Viewer Counts by Streamer
Like with average viewers, Bjergsen rules the chart again in January, becoming the only League streamer in the last two months to break 50,000 concurrent viewers. (Gosu peaked at over 90,000 in November, as many people pointed out last month).
brTT moved the most of anyone on the chart, topping out just shy of 900 viewers in December but hitting over 32,000 after rejoining paiN. Almost as impressive is Pobelter climbing 25 spots and peaking at over 33,000 viewers. Anything is possible if you set your mind to it, especially if you have an IQ of 200.
Most Watched Streams
Qtpie blew past the 5 million viewer hour mark and nearly hit 6 million for the month. That equals 7.36% of all League of Legends stream viewing. No one else came close to matching his viewership combined with his 9-10 hour average broadcast length. Nightblue3, his closest competitor for the crown, had half as many viewer hours.
Sneaky saw the most dramatic rise in popularity as he had a nearly 12x increase in viewer hours. Not only did he have higher viewer numbers, but he also broadcasted for 170 more hours than December.
For all the support mains who don’t see any role models on the list, fear not: Krepo just missed it at #13 while Aphromoo finished just outside the top 25.
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 if you want to grab it when it’s live.
