A few days ago Twitch star Tyler1, arguably the most popular League of Legends streamer on the platform, had some harsh criticism about Worlds, the most prestigious competition of the game. Tyler1 said that the event had killed the North American League of Legends streaming scene, causing the streamer's viewership numbers to decrease drastically. According to Tyler1 the main reason this was happening is because of the time slot of Worlds since it is a terrible time for North American content creators to stream, which obviously makes the streamers' life harder.
We at Streams Charts decided to gather all the necessary stats to see if Tyler1 affirmations are actually true, and if so how much are the North American streamers being affected.
Worlds is arguably the most popular esports event of the year, and for League of Legends fans, it's the culmination of everything that happened during the year. So it’s normal that Worlds ”steals” some of the viewers from streamers. It has the best teams and players in the world, so fans will want to watch the event since it's where the best of the best compete.
After going through all the data it seems that Tyler1 is 100% correct in his assessment. However, it's not normal that North American streamers are losing viewers at the scale that is happening.
Worth noting that most streamers' airtime increased since Worlds began. Doublelift number of hours streamed went up 33%, while IWDominate airtime increased by 50.1%. This is due to the fact that both streamers do a lot of content around the event, such as analyzing the games while they are happening. TFBlade airtime also increased by 9.9%. However, two of the content creators streamed fewer hours during this period, with Tyler1 airtime decreasing by 16.6%, and tarzaned broadcast time also going down by 14.3%, which might have played a factor in the streamers' viewership drop.
If we look at Tyler1 numbers previous to the start of Worlds, the North American megastar had 16.1K Average Viewers, and since then his viewership had an 11% drop, with the streamer now having 14.3K viewers tuning into his streams regularly. But he wasn't the only one to suffer a drop in viewership, as multiple times LCS winner and one of the best ADC of all time Doublelift experienced the same. Doublelif viewership dropped drastically, as the streamer lost 48.3% of his AV since Worlds started. He now has 7K Average Viewers, when before his average was well above the 10K mark.
Popular streamer IWDominate, which is one of the most knowledgeable Leagues of Legends streamers on the platform, saw his number of Average Viewers go down 14.6%, despite the fact he does most of his content around Worlds at this point of the year. Tarzaned was also heavily impacted by this. The high elo jungler, who also coaches, lost 52.4% of his Average Viewers, which is something no streamer wants. Popular streamer TFBlade also saw his viewership diminish, as he lost 21% of the viewers that tuned into his broadcast on a regular basis.
There were many other streamers such as sneakylol, Sanchovies, Trick2g, and Meteos who also had a considerable drop in the number of Average Viewers.
The English language is the most popular when it comes to Worlds broadcasts. When Worlds is on, the tournament occupies 66% of all the viewers in the League of Legends category. Curiously 25% of all the HW for Riot Games comes from English broadcasts, which shows how important English-speaking viewers are. This definitely impacts North American streamers since their primary audience is English-speaking, and when the event is on most of those viewers will choose to watch the tournament instead of other content creators. When the event isn’t live, it makes up 14% of all the viewers. However, at the time the event is off, is not the ideal timeframe for North American content creators to stream.
As we can see in the graph, since Worlds started, the majority of HW on League of Legends, for the English language, comes from the event. Some days the channels that aren’t broadcasting Worlds have more HW, but on the days that happened, it was because the matches were late for European fans, who are the majority of English-speaking viewers of Worlds. So it’s more on the time zone, than viewers preferring to watch other League of Legends broadcasts instead of Worlds.
If we compare it with all the non-English broadcasts of Worlds, we can see that the disparity between channels that are streaming the tournament, or non-English channels that broadcasted other League of Legends content is not that big. This means that content creators can still stream the game, without losing many viewers. With most games starting late at night for European and Asian viewers, the streamers from both regions can stream during the afternoon until the games begin, and will not lose a big amount of viewers, and sometimes no viewers at all. So it rarely impacts their streaming schedule or takes viewers from them.
As for North American streamers, it’s expected that once Worlds ends, they will see their number of Average Viewers increase, and will not have to worry about streaming at non-optimal hours.
Worlds 2022 playoffs are in full force, with the tournament being very close to the grand final. Its do or die time for the remaining four teams at the event, and you can follow playoff statistics here.
