Balloon World Cup 2022, the second edition of event by the popular Spanish streamer Ibai ‘ibai Llanos, took place on October 27. In a new Streams Charts article, we'll tell you about the viewership of such an unusual tournament, who made the victory for Spain, and which broadcasting channels were the most popular.
The debut Balloon World Cup was organized by Ibai ‘ibai’ Llanos and FC Barcelona defender Gerard Piqué in October 2021. The idea for this competition was taken from a video on social networks, where two brothers play at home with a balloon with rather funny rules. Participants must keep the balloon in the air, touching it in turn. The winner is the one who touches the balloon last before it drops to the ground.
Balloon World Cup 2022 is the second world championship for a "discipline" that was created during the coronavirus pandemic. The venue of the tournament was once again the Spanish conference center PortAventura, but the number of participating countries was reduced from 32 to 16. This time the event had full-fledged qualifiers, which took place in different regions of the world. In the Balloon World Cup 2022 Grand Final, Spanish player Miguel Imbroda defeated the Brazilian player Claudio Lassance with the score of 4:2.
Viewership Statistics
Balloon World Cup 2022 was on air for nearly five hours and amassed a little under 1.1 million Hours Watched. The tournament's Peak Viewers number exceeded 366.2K people and drew 220K Average Viewers. The main championship broadcast ran on the ibai channel and accounted for nearly 77% of Balloon World Cup 2022's HW total. The Top 3 by this metric also includes the popular French streamer Kamet0 and wtcN from Turkey, whose contribution to HW total was 18% and 2.5%, respectively. At the same time, the Top 3 channels by PV looks similar.
We have analyzed the chat of the main broadcast of Balloon World Cup 2022, which took place on the channel of the tournament organizer. We found that 12.6K users sent more than 64.1K messages to the ibai chat, using 488.7K words. At the same time, 38 Cheer chatters sent 64 Cheer messages. Viewers mostly supported the Spanish representative by using a variety of symbols in the chat. The most frequently used (39.4K times) in the ibai chat was the ibaiOrgullo emote, which shows the pokemon Dragonite standing proud of his country with the Spanish flag in the background. The Top 3 most used chat emotes also includes the name of the country and its flag, which were sent 34.3K and 26.3K times, respectively.
Ibai was the main caster of Balloon World Cup 2022, but not the only one. The event was broadcast in multiple languages, with content creators ranging from Kamet0 from France to daniellippens from the Netherlands.
In total, about 988.6K Unique Viewers watched the Balloon World Cup 2022 broadcast, 69% of them were authorized on Twitch. The leader by this metric among the channels is ibai, whose streams were watched by 735K Unique Viewers. The Top 5 also includes Kamet0, wtcN, Movi_Mind from Portugal and Vlesk from Germany. Interestingly, the English-language broadcast on TwitchRivals was watched only by Authorized Unique Viewers.
Balloon World Cup 2022's viewership statistics dropped significantly compared to the debut tournament. The championship's PV number dropped by 2 times, the AV number dropped by 2.35 times, and the HW number fell by 2.8 times. At the same time, the Airtime of the competition decreased by only one hour.
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Balloon World Cup 2022 lagged behind the previous year's championship in all metrics, but it is difficult to call the tournament unsuccessful, as hundreds of thousands of viewers watched the qualifiers and the competition itself. It should be noted that this number is even bigger than the audience of some major esports tournaments such as ESL One Malaysia 2022 in Dota 2 or European Masters Spring 2022 in LoL.
