Launched in May 2020 by the Singapore-based game developer and publisher Garena, Booyah! is a live-streaming platform dedicated primarily to Garena Free Fire. Although Booyah! is not restricted to only one title, its features are catered to the Free Fire audience: that said, the name of the platform itself refers to the moment of victory in Free Fire ("Booyah" is an analogue for "Winner, winner, chicken dinner" in PUBG).
Created primarily as an app, Booyah! features user-generated livestreams, as well as short clips and highlights. Its integration with free Fire allows users to link their game accounts with the app, generate Free Fire match highlights or even create custom lobbies to play with or against their audience.
The platform’s approach is very community-oriented and offers a variety of interactive features, such as reward and partner programs, drop-enabled streams and a ranking system based on the popularity of streamers. Besides streamer events, Booyah! also regularly hosts Free Fire tournaments with in-game rewards and real money prizes.
Viewership dynamics
Disclaimer: These viewership statistics include data from March 2021 to February 2022.
Booyah!’s first months after the launch were relatively quiet, but its viewership skyrocketed with the dawn of 2021. From May to December 2020, the platform’s audience totalled 15M Hours Watched, with the highest platform peak of 427K concurrent viewers. However, in March 2021 alone, its viewership reached nearly double that — 27.79M Hours Watched.
In the following months, Booyah!’s viewership continued rising exponentially, despite the fact that the total platform Air Time remained consistent throughout the year. The growth continued until August 2021, when the platform accumulated over 131M Hours Watched by 177.7K Average Viewers, which ended up being Booyah!’s most successful month to date for both metrics.
The highest viewership peak was reached in May, when a total of 1.22M concurrent viewers tuned in to Booyahs!’s broadcast. This was also the only time when the platform’s concurrent viewership surpassed 1M Peak Viewers.
The number of monthly average channels broadcasting on the platform kept continually decreasing throughout the year, from 2.49K in March 2021 to 1.55K in December. The highest channel peaks were reached in April — 19.6K, and December — 18.5K, which were the only two months when the number of channels concurrently broadcasting on the platform surpassed 10K. During the rest of the year, this number fluctuated between 3K and 5K
Since summer 2021, Booyah!’s viewership started declining again to reach levels from the beginning of 2021. In February 2022, the platform’s Hours Watched count was only 59K HW, showing a 20.31% month-on-month decrease. The number of average channels that broadcast in February accounted for 1.26K, while the number of Average Viewers who tuned into these streams accounted for 87.9K.
The total number of Hours Watched generated on Booyah! during the past twelve months equalled 1.083B HW. For comparison, Twitch accumulated 24B HW in 2021, Facebook Gaming accumulated 5.45B HW, and Trovo accumulated 263M HW.
Language distribution
Because Booyah! is focused primarily on LATAM, India and Brazil markets, the language distribution on the platform sees Portuguese and Spanish as the most prevalent languages on the platform.
During the past year, Portuguese accounted for 46.53% of the platform's total Hours Watched, followed by Spanish (26.36%) and English (13.3%). The rest of Booyah!’s audience speaks Vietnamese, Arabic and Indonesian.
Games
Unsurprisingly, the most popular game on the platform is Garena Free Fire, which was responsible for generating 86.2% of Booyah!’s total Hours Watched during the past twelve months.
The second most watched category on the platform is GTA V, followed by IRL, Minecraft: Pocket Edition and Minecraft. Some of the other titles that gained traction on the platform were Clash Royale, FIFA 21, Among Us, Dota 2 and Arena of Valor.
Popular streamers
The most popular content creator on Booyah! is Lucio “Cerol” dos Santos, who in the past twelve months generated 32.38M Hours Watched. Moreover, he hit the second highest viewership peak on the platform — 319.16K concurrent viewers. The Brazilian streamer, who won the vote for the best streamer in the country at the eSports Brasil 2019 Award, is known mostly for streaming Free Fire, with 86.46% of his HW count generated by broadcasting the game. Furthermore, Cerol's average viewership is the second highest on the platform, with 16.34 Average Viewers watching his broadcasts throughout the past year.
With 15.6M Hours Watched, the second most watched channel on the platform was Seven Premios, a 24-hour channel run by the streaming organization Seven TV. Correspondingly, the channel's total Air Time during the last twelve months was by far the highest — 7.77K hours.
The rest of the Top 10 most watched Booyah! streamers included LOUD Eltin, DELO, WEEDZAO, The Wick, NFA, BÁC GẤU, JoelThePro and BUXEXA, who holds the platform’s concurrent viewership record — 349.15K Peak Viewers. All of the streamers in the Top 10 streamed primarily Free Fire.
Gender distribution
Gender distribution among the Top 100 most-watched Booyah! channels during the past twelve months showed male streamers as the dominant group, with 72 out of 100 being male streamers. Out of 300.17M Hours Watched generated by the Top 100, male streamers accumulated 213.2M HW (71%).
The second most prevalent were group channels owned by small esports organisations from LATAM region, or by groups of gaming enthusiasts who create content. In total, 16 such channels got into the Top 100, contributing 64.39K Hours Watched (21.5%).
Despite the fairly high representation of female streamers on the platform, only 12 female creators were among the Top 100 most watched Booyah! streamers. Their contribution to the total HW by the Top 100 was 22.58K Hours Watched (7.5%).