Another year and another canvas has come and gone for r/place. The collective art project hosted by Reddit has taken the internet by storm with every iteration. This year is no different, as the streaming world erupts for the pixel war. In this piece, we will take a look and who gained the most from r/place and who went above and beyond their community.
The 2023 event started on the 20th of July and was only announced on the 19th of the same month. It immediately took on momentum and gained speed. Streamers scrambled to not only utilise the novelty of the event for views but also support their community. R/place has been about communities since it started, with its no-holds barred rules communities are free to form alliances and become enemies with whomever they wish; communities are constantly at war trying to place pixels on each others’ artwork. Streamers found the entertainment value in this quickly and r/place had its best year ever in terms of popularity in 2023. R/place eventually came to a close just before the clock struck midnight on the 25th of July.
R/place canvas evolution by day (1-5)
Although r/place has already left us behind for another year, plenty happened during the few days it was active. Communities from around the world put together artwork collaboratively and banded together to protect their artwork. Of course, the typical flags that are ever-present in r/place made a reappearance. In the Global Leaderboards of r/place created by Reddit, the United States was the most active country with 19.2M pixels placed.
However, Germany was close behind with 18.9M pixels and France finished up the podium spots with 10.2M. As is typical for r/place, German and French flags dominated the canvas, with multiple German flags spanning the entire canvas and two French pillars taking up each side of the board during its run. Ultimately, France could not defend its territory, but Germany remained strong. By the end of the event, there were four large German flags on the canvas, and two of these spanned the entire width of the canvas, featuring small artwork to do with German culture but also some small communities featuring.
Brazilian streamer Cellbit also received recognition from the overall Reddit community for his intricate and epic artworks. As the canvas expanded, Cellbit took advantage of the blank space to organise his community into building complicated pixel art pieces. His Minecraft community from the QSMP server were highly supportive and his artwork managed to survive until the end of the canvas.
Full timelapse of the r/place 2023 canvas, via MLGaeming on YouTube.
Not all was positive for the Reddit event though, many users took to r/place seeing an opportunity for protest. Reddit has come under scrutiny by its community due to its decision to charge companies for API access, which has effectively shut down many third-party apps. Users from around the world flocked to r/place to express their dissatisfaction with spez, Reddit’s CEO. The situation came to a boiling point as France’s community organised a drawing of Reddit’s mascot involved with a guillotine with the French flag as the background.
Missed out on taking part in r/place and want to experience what it was like? Consider checking out Reddit’s official timelapses on YouTube, Day 1 starts here but each day has there own separate video on the channel.
R/place viewership analysis
Top streamers of r/place by Hours Watched and Peak Viewers, July 21-25th 2023
At the top of the charts, and by quite a margin, is Papaplatte. Papaplatte is a German streamer and one of the most popular German creators on Twitch. He experienced one of his best months yet on the platform thanks to the consistently powerful viewership he experienced with r/place. The German community is known to be fiery and passionate when it comes to r/place, historically taking over the entire canvas with German flags and icons.
This helped elevate Papaplatte to the top, as the streamer reached 2.35M Hours Watched, over a million more than anyone else. In fact, Papaplatte achieved 94% of the total of the other nine streamers on this most-watched ranking. The joys were never-ending: including when his friend directed him to xQc’s stream, where xQc was in disbelief of Papaplatte’s community. Papa’s friend can be heard exclaiming “He can’t believe it”.
Not too close behind Papa was Stegi, and a little further behind Stegi was ohnePixel. Both are German creators on Twitch but Stegi proved to be the bigger r/place star, with his 582.2K hours watch time. Stegi rallied the power of the German community behind him and landed ahead of Rubius in this ranking, despite having less than 500K Followers on Twitch. Even with almost half of ohnePixel’s following, he still outranked him; however, ohnePixel did not dedicate his streaming to r/place. His streams continued to be Counter-Strike-related and his r/place content was secondary. Looking at the viewership dynamics for his streams, the Counter-Strike was the real highlight for his community.
Spanish streamer Rubius came in third place with 498.5K Hours Watched throughout r/place. The Spaniard is one of the biggest streamers on Twitch so it's no surprise he ranks so highly. Nevertheless, his r/place streams were successful, achieving far above-average watch time and proved to have the largest audience of his most recent streams these last couple of months.
Finishing up the Hours Watched ranking is ElSpreen. The Argentine with 8.31M Followers on Twitch did rank in the top five with 232.1K but did not set any personal records. His r/place streams were successful no doubt, but they pale in comparison to some of his other special streams recently, such as the La Casa Madrid collaboration streams. Finally, turning to Peak Viewers the streamers largely remain the same, with the exception of tarik. Tarik was participating in r/place whilst also community casting the Last Chance Qualifier games for North American Valorant. Although he was invested in r/place, his Valorant streams are what really drew in the peak viewership here.
A lot of the top performers in this category seem to be top streamers who have the advantage of their massive community. So, let's take a look at the biggest personal records set by streamers in terms of their concurrent viewership.
Top 10 channels by Peak Viewers who broke personal records for concurrent viewership
Papaplatte claimed the top spot of this ranking, with a peak concurrent viewership of 120K. Stegi followed close behind with his personal record of 47.3K, and after this is when things started to cool down. Interestingly, a lot of the top-ranked streamers in this data are either French or German. R/place is historically known for becoming a war between the two biggest nationalities in Europe, and this year was no different.
French streamers FalkaLive, FemiMarrs, and Lewislefou made up the next three spots. They all achieved Peak Viewers in the 8Ks, however, Lewislefou matched this despite only 19K Followers on Twitch. The French Canadian streamer smashed his previous personal record of 4.1K and he landed just less than 100 Peak Viewers behind FemiMarss, who has a following of 150K.
After these, we take a break to JulesaufYouTube. 7.3K concurrent viewers was a new personal record for JulesaufYouTube on Twitch and the streamer with 30K Followers on Twitch got his Average Viewers into the thousands for the first time in his live streaming career. Following Jules are two more French streamers, AzylHOME and oOPaRaDiSeOo; AzylHOME reached his peak of 7K on the second day of the event, although he streamed the remainder of the days for the event they slowly received less and less viewership for his channel. oOPaRaDiSeOo was a similar story, they both started strong achieving their peaks during the first couple of days, but then lost steam. Perhaps a lot of their audience that was there to help out their country in r/place found a bigger streamer to watch.
Finally, zonia of Kick set a record on her channel too, with the figure of 3.3K representing a 1656% increase from her previous best of 193.
Seeing a mixture of YouTube, Kick, and Twitch, made us curious at Streams Charts as to which was the best performing platform. Twitch was far ahead of the competition, making up almost 95% of all Hours Watched for the art project.
However, of the rest of the platforms, Kick makes up a surprisingly large proportion compared to YouTube. Ultimately, Kick received just under half of YouTube’s viewership and only 1.7% of the total watch time separated them.
Twitch not only was responsible for almost the entirety of the watch time but also for the 4,117 channels live covering r/place, Twitch makes up nearly the entirety of these channels. Curiously, more channels went live covering r/place on Kick than on YouTube. Less than 60 channels went live on YouTube, incomparable to Twitch’s nearly 4K, but quite close to Nonolive. It's a rare occasion that we get the chance to say YouTube and Nonolive are comparable, but in terms of the number of channels that were live during r/place, the difference is only 13 channels.
R/place has come and gone another time, but waves and hype trains won’t disappear from the live-streaming industry. If you want to stay up to date on all the new happenings in live streaming, follow the data on Streams Charts, with a PRO subscription granting unlimited database access.
