On July 13, the fourth edition of the highly successful La Velada del Año boxing event was held at the Estadio Santiago Bernabéu, the home stadium of legendary football club Real Madrid. As has been its calling card over the past few years, it broke a slew of viewership milestones on Twitch, so Streams Charts looks at its statistics and those of other top live-streamed events to understand what made it stand out and attract such large audience numbers.
Ibai's boxing event reached more than 3.87M Peak Viewers on his personal Twitch channel, making it his most popular ever. The platform also benefitted from it, seeing a record overall audience reach of a staggering 6.74M concurrent viewers, which sneaked past the previous mark set during the 2022 iteration.
It is now Twitch's most popular live-streamed event of all time, with the first three entries belonging to this event. What makes these exhibitions so popular among audiences is the caliber of content creators and celebrities in attendance, either to fight their peers or perform for spectators in the venue and those watching from home. With such a star-studded line-up usually making its presence felt, the platform itself promotes it a lot, helping pull in that many more viewers intersted in seeing what all the fuss is about.
Of course, combat sports are an in-demand genre among streamers and viewers, with many influencers making a name by providing coverage to UFC and WWE events and the like. Hence, by pitting a bunch of renowned creators in the Hispanic community against each other every year, ibai is able to generate lots of hype for each card.
Moreover, artists like Will Smith performing on stage at these shows only enhance the experience for those watching at the venue or home. We must also note that with the show's creator and host himself breaking individual platform records each year, co-casting has a subdued role in this event continuously raising the bar when it comes to audience reach.
The overall number of channels covering La Velada del Año IV fell to 72 from 333 last year, but that didn't stop it from creating new records. It is the pulling power that ibai possesses that helps attract millions, although the cumulative effect of all channels live broadcasting the bouts does play a part in matching or surpassing the platform's milestones.
Of the other events that make the most popular list on the purple platform, two more shows belong to the non-esports category. Making the top five is the #PS5 The Future of Gaming Show from June 20220, which attracted a huge 2.88M PV thanks to the announcement of the much-awaited PlayStation 5. This is not surprising given the presentation of new gaming consoles remains a huge deal in the gaming community.
In the case of this event, YouTube provided the majority of viewers, but the audience Twitch attracted was enough to make it one of its most successful ever by peak concurrent viewership. The anticipation for the showcase of the new Japanese console was all it took to attract a whopping 7.2M people on four different platforms at its peak, with most of the heavy lifting done by the official channels.
The other show to find a place on this leaderboard is The Game Awards 2020, which reached 1.90M PV on Twitch. It was streamed on the red platform as well, with the official channels proving more than useful in attracting millions to catch their favorite games, players, and streamers fight it out for one of the most prestigious gongs in the esports community.
One of the popular Twitch Rivals series of competitions — Twitch Rivals Squid Craft Games ft. Komanche — hit 2.25M PV on the Amazon-owned streaming service. This is more of a hybrid tournament series held among Spanish-speaking streamers that banks a lot on co-streaming to reach a wider audience base.
Among the 150 participants who competed in various Minecraft mini-games over six days and were eliminated from the event one by one were the likes of Ibai, Rubius, and Auronplay, easily some of the most recognizable Hispanic influencers. That meant that over 150 channels covered proceedings, helping reach a level of viewers not usually seen.
It helps that the sandbox game is hugely popular among Spanish-speaking spectators and streamers, meaning the language has far higher peak performances than any other on Twitch thanks to such events. This has also helped make the Squid Craft Games one of the most popular (by PV) live-streaming events across esports and streaming.
Coming to esports, League of Legends dominates the remaining places, taking up three slots. They come from the last three World Championships, with this season-ending series taking on a mythical reputation thanks to the stakes involved, quality of action (teams and players), the popularity of the game, and the kind of massive viewership numbers it puts on the board.
One thing that has become clear is that these competitions bank massively on co-casting to reach a broader spectrum of audiences. For example, last year's event reached the highest peak viewership in esports history at a frankly unbelievable 6.4M PV, aided mostly by a higher number of community casters.
It is no coincidence that since 2022, when Riot Games first allowed community casters, the series has been on an upward curve, with that year's tournament becoming the series' first to reach over 5M PV. With 150% more community casters covering the Worlds 2023, the esports peak viewership record that was held by the Free Fire World Series 2021 Singapore for years almost two and a half years was finally broken, and how!
The final entry we will talk about comes from another legendary name in the video gaming and competitive spheres: Counter-Strike 2. One of the major events in its annual calendar, PGL Major Stockholm 2021, just edged past the 2M PV mark on Twitch during the Grand Final between Natus Vincere and G2 Esports.
Apart from the sheer following that Valve's game enjoys, fans also love to follow their favorite players and teams. There was also the fact that this was the first Major in the game after the COVID-19 pandemic, so there was a lot of hype around it among fans. NAVI, easily the most popular side in the game, making the final meant that it was a case of the stars aligning to help make this tournament one of the most popular ever on Twitch.
This is a game where language dynamics play a crucial role, with the presence of Russian and Portuguese audiences often making or breaking the viewership success of its competitions. It was the same with the Sweden event, where the former's spectators preferred to catch the shooter's action event though LoL's Worlds 2021 was going on at the same time while the latter's audiences watched more CS2, at least when it came to the decisive matches.
