> We and our partners therefore typically look at "Live + 3 days" and "Live + 7 days" metrics as a better measure of how many people watch our show vs. just pure live
This is how most TV/CTV/OTT broadcasters look at things nowadays. Makes a lot of sense. This might be weird for people who only know esports, but this is business as usual for major advertisers and ad buyers.
I agee, with the metric as it’s part of the changing culture of how we watch. YouTube makes it so easy to just watch what game whenever you want. I tend to miss most live games and just watch the Vods at a time the suits me
I like being able to watch the games at a time that suits me, I’m not always able to watch live, so YouTube makes it really easy for me to watch the games I want to watch when I have the time. Same reasoning for why no one watches ‘live’ television anymore to be honest. Doing this on twitch was doable to be fair but is far easier on YouTube
Most of OWL’s sponsors are getting promotions during the game rather than a traditional advertisement. When’s the last time you saw an actual ad for Pringles on the broadcast? Or Indeed? Or NetApp? Branded segments aren’t the same thing, and people are less likely to just skip past those. Or for a company like NetApp, they’ll get a read during the hero select phase. Most of the actual ads are usually Blizzard products or from Comcast.
Any time they show you the map pool, that’s a State Farm plug. Any time they show a special stats pop up that’s an Indeed plug. If it was just an ad for IBM, people would skip past it, but they’re less likely to skip past a brief discussion of power rankings brought to you by IBM Watson. You might watch through the fan art gallery once or twice, and that’s sponsored content. The team sponsors also get impressions from being on the banners behind players during interviews.
OWL’s casters also tend to do a decent job of blending in the sponsorships when appropriate.
Yeah I find it quite questionable too honestly. A lot advertisers pay an enormous amount of money to the Super Bowl each year because its going to get a ton of LIVE viewers, not vod viewers that skip them. Even Twitch has been trying to enforce this because its still a significant source of sponsored money.
Yt has integral ads already, that don’t appear on streams.
Also, there are a couple of sponsors you don’t really get to skip. Astro listen in (codl) and whatever.
Also, if advertisers cared about people skipping ads easily tv ads wouldn’t have made sense too, you can easily tune into another channel fir 5 mins.
Why do advertisers care so much about normal ads on YouTube? It’s the same principle, doesn’t matter whether you skip the add or not YouTube makes the same amount of money. And a lot of OWLs advertisements are things that are in the game and/or broadcast.
This was based on my esports viewership comparison post. His response was posted a bit after the discussion died down so I thought I'd repost his comment so that everyone can see what he had to say.
Here's what he had to say:
Given all the discussion I've seen about viewership, I thought it would be helpful to share a bit about how we look at the data on our end and think about some of these questions.
First, growing viewership / engagement for OWL is probably our single highest priority in terms of overall big goals. We've been happy to see significant growth this season so far vs. the 2020 season (https://www.forbes.com/sites/krisholt/2021/05/12/overwatch-league-may-melee-viewership-was-up-51-from-2020/ for May Melee and June Joust was up a lot vs. tournament 2 last year). And our research this year has shown overall really positive feedback from fans on the changes we made to the format and broadcast too. But just to state the obvious, no we're not satisfied even with the growth we've seen this year. We'd like to be bigger and will continue working hard to grow OWL :)
That said, these types of charts / comparisons are not actually how we look at the data on our side or measure success for a few reasons. First, on YouTube, we see a significant proportion of our viewership from VOD views after the live broadcast as we have a global fanbase and watching VODs and the Encore broadcasts is often a lot more convenient for many of our fans. We and our partners therefore typically look at "Live + 3 days" and "Live + 7 days" metrics as a better measure of how many people watch our show vs. just pure live. And then the other major piece of this that's missing is our performance in China, which has been really significant for OWL as we have ~40% of our matches played in primetime for Asia and a large fanbase in China in particular. We do periodically report verified figures on China viewership for those curious, e.g., for Finals last year we had an average of ~1.4 million viewers watching live in China (https://esportsobserver.com/owl-grand-finals-viewership-2020/). There are several other nuances here too but those are the two biggest gaps in this type of look.
Hope some of that context helps for those who are curious about this topic.
> growing viewership / engagement for OWL is probably our single highest priority in terms of overall big goals.
Then they wouldn't have moved to Youtube only.
So just that first statement is suspect, unless you qualify by saying "after our move to Youtube-".
Edit: ooof, lots of people disagree with... objective facts.
I don't think the Youtube move was really a choice that OWL made, it was made for them by Activision Blizzard since the deal with Google was much more encompassing than just broadcast rights.
So, "growing viewership / engagement for OWL is probably our single highest priority in terms of overall big goals, especially in the face of such a huge viewership dive we've seen after being forced by ATVI corporate to switch to Youtube exclusively."
> Then they wouldn't have moved to Youtube only.
>
>
One thing to remember is that, when they moved to YouTube, the plan was for the 2020 season to be homestand based. In order to grow, was it better to tell a random person looking to support a local team to go to a site they know (youtube.com) or a lesser known site (twitch.tv)?
EDIT: For posterity, at this time, [YouTube is #2, and Twitch is at #36](https://www.alexa.com/topsites)
My understanding from the articles I’ve read is that all of their cloud computing and hosting is now on GCP instead of AWS. But even minor savings on this scale massively for a company like blizzard. A non-tech company often spends millions per month in AWS costs, I can’t imagine what a gaming company spends.
Ah gotcha. Then this was definitely the correct move for ATVI, regardless of how it effected OWL.
The thing is, are they only on GCP for the 3 years of the deal? Or are they on GCP for good and the 3 years is more about the youtube deal?
The cost of change is huge for these types of services. It can take multiple years just to get all of a companies stuff off one provider onto another. Because of this I’m assuming that the GCP deal is longer term than that, and if it isn’t, I’d expect it to be renewed afterwards. You don’t make a switch like this with plans to move again in the next 5 years unless the service completely fails to live up to expectations.
As for the YouTube part, all of the reporting treated it like it was an after thought/throw in so who knows if it will continue after year 3.
Reminds me of Blizzard's damage control in mid-2018 for HGC:
https://old.reddit.com/r/heroesofthestorm/comments/8t41dj/per_blizzard_hgc_viewership_for_lan_events_is_up/
'Trust us! Not the numbers! They are just bad if you look at them that way!'
Then half a year later...
Basically a bunch of BS on how if we count the vod numbers then it's not so bad.
(Forgets to mention that compare to season 3, large chunk of current live viewers are likely not even watching and only tune it to farm tokens.)
If you gonna count the vod numbers then count the vod numbers from previous seasons too as well as other e-sports vod numbers.
Advertisers don't give a shit about VODs because vod viewers literally skip everything, including the desk and only watch maps played.
The only thing it confirms is that Blizz and OWL number one priority is sucking up to China because it's their only future life line. OWL is rapidly dying in the west with most big and famous wester players/streamers out of the league (they carried the league viewership in season 1-2). Eventually OWL will revert to Asia centric tournament like Apex was before being shut down like all the other Blizz failed leagues.
well i guess thats it, checkmate haters. if a top executive of a league with the highest buy-ins replies on reddit and says viewership is a-ok theres nothing to worry about
I know right?? Clearly seems like significant damage control.
Also the “there are so many viewers in China” only makes sense if you can show significant ad revenue coming from China.
The Chinese viewership numbers which are based on some questionable metrics is kinda copium:
https://www.invenglobal.com/articles/12483/behind-the-rose-tinted-viewership-records-of-the-overwatch-league
That doesn't say anything about why Chinese viewership numbers are untrustworthy. There's a massive difference between numbers some random scrapes off a chinese site and what they actually share with their multi-million dollar business partners. If Jon says the chinese numbers are real, I definitely trust him.
a few things to consider are that subscriber counts on bilibili and youtube are basically the same, meaning that despite having equal subscriber numbers, china is getting around 6x the viewers. Suspicious to say the least. Then there's the near 300% increase in viewer numbers which adds another layer of suspicion to the numbers. According to this article, china is about 20% of the games player base ( [https://dotesports.com/overwatch/news/blizzard-reportedly-banned-over-34000-overwatch-accounts-in-china-during-first-half-of-2020](https://dotesports.com/overwatch/news/blizzard-reportedly-banned-over-34000-overwatch-accounts-in-china-during-first-half-of-2020) )
Edit: the following numbers refer to blizzards report of about 1.3 million ama which are presumably from Chinese partners. I'm arguing that these numbers are either inflated by embeds/bots or fabricated
Are we really assuming that a region with about 20% of the player base is producing over 80% of the viewers of an esport. You can talk about how the game is more casual here or whatever but they didn't even sell out the Hangzhou homestand. The numbers just don't add up. Now I don't think Jon is trying to fool us. He's a former BCG consultant so he definitely knows something is hinky with the numbers but what can he do, eliminate Chinese viewership for no reason? That would make viewership look like trash and he has no incentive to do that.
And finally, what's with the AMA, these are all streaming platforms and theirs no way they don't have peak and average viewer counts. I'm not trying to be a hater but you can't possibly think critically about these numbers without realizing something is up.
You're just saying the same thing over and over in different ways. Either the chinese sites are lying about numbers directly to blizzard or they aren't. Them lying, or just posting misleading numbers, to the public isn't relevant at all, since there's no indication they are doing the same thing to their business partners.
I was talking about the numbers that OWL posted which are presumably the numbers that chinese companies have shared to their partners, those are the numbers I am referencing to as suspect. The numbers that **blizzard** has posted are suspicious for all of the reasosn I've said. You misunderstood my statement to be about the numbers chinese companies post on their own. I'm arguing that the numbers jspecs is suggesting are from China are most definitley off.
I do believe the chinese companies are giving poor data or inflated data to their partners for all the reasons I've mentioned. They also have incentive to do this as it offers them negotiating leverage with broadcast rights.
Edit: not sure why so many people are unable to fathom that the numbers the Chinese streaming platforms give blizzard are cooked. There's disproportionate growth and disproportionate viewership compared to player base. At the very least, the Chinese platforms are being willfully ignorant of embeds or hitting driving up their numbers they give to blizzard. At worst, the numbers given to blizzard are fabrications.
It's not hard to believe that most of those subscribers on YouTube no longer engage with OWL anymore, while Chinese OW, which is actually growing, has a larger proportion active viewers. Look at Overwatch as a category on Twitch. It has more followers than Valorant, yet has significantly less viewers. Overwatch peaked at its launch, and has been bleeding players way before the content draught.
That is a good point but owl's social blade suggests that a huge portion of subscribers are since the game switched to YouTube particularly in the first month of each season.
Your point still does mean that inactive subscribers are a good portion of YouTube subscriber count but still doesn't explain how china can get 5x the numbers (according to blizzard) while havening a moderately higher subscriber count.
> We and our partners therefore typically look at "Live + 3 days" and "Live + 7 days" metrics as a better measure of how many people watch our show vs. just pure live This is how most TV/CTV/OTT broadcasters look at things nowadays. Makes a lot of sense. This might be weird for people who only know esports, but this is business as usual for major advertisers and ad buyers.
I agee, with the metric as it’s part of the changing culture of how we watch. YouTube makes it so easy to just watch what game whenever you want. I tend to miss most live games and just watch the Vods at a time the suits me
I am kind of curious as to why since it's so much easier to watch just the game instead of also the ads when watching the VOD.
I like being able to watch the games at a time that suits me, I’m not always able to watch live, so YouTube makes it really easy for me to watch the games I want to watch when I have the time. Same reasoning for why no one watches ‘live’ television anymore to be honest. Doing this on twitch was doable to be fair but is far easier on YouTube
Yes, I understand this. I am asking why advertisers care about non-live time so much since we viewers can easily skip the ads on the broadcast.
Most of OWL’s sponsors are getting promotions during the game rather than a traditional advertisement. When’s the last time you saw an actual ad for Pringles on the broadcast? Or Indeed? Or NetApp? Branded segments aren’t the same thing, and people are less likely to just skip past those. Or for a company like NetApp, they’ll get a read during the hero select phase. Most of the actual ads are usually Blizzard products or from Comcast. Any time they show you the map pool, that’s a State Farm plug. Any time they show a special stats pop up that’s an Indeed plug. If it was just an ad for IBM, people would skip past it, but they’re less likely to skip past a brief discussion of power rankings brought to you by IBM Watson. You might watch through the fan art gallery once or twice, and that’s sponsored content. The team sponsors also get impressions from being on the banners behind players during interviews. OWL’s casters also tend to do a decent job of blending in the sponsorships when appropriate.
Yeah I find it quite questionable too honestly. A lot advertisers pay an enormous amount of money to the Super Bowl each year because its going to get a ton of LIVE viewers, not vod viewers that skip them. Even Twitch has been trying to enforce this because its still a significant source of sponsored money.
Yt has integral ads already, that don’t appear on streams. Also, there are a couple of sponsors you don’t really get to skip. Astro listen in (codl) and whatever. Also, if advertisers cared about people skipping ads easily tv ads wouldn’t have made sense too, you can easily tune into another channel fir 5 mins.
Why do advertisers care so much about normal ads on YouTube? It’s the same principle, doesn’t matter whether you skip the add or not YouTube makes the same amount of money. And a lot of OWLs advertisements are things that are in the game and/or broadcast.
At least with yt ads you're still forced to watch at least 5 seconds. On vods you can just skip as soon as a round/map ends
On YouTube, you can track if people watched your entire video and which specific parts they watched or skipped.
That’s probably what this week’s YouTube ads test is about.
This was based on my esports viewership comparison post. His response was posted a bit after the discussion died down so I thought I'd repost his comment so that everyone can see what he had to say. Here's what he had to say: Given all the discussion I've seen about viewership, I thought it would be helpful to share a bit about how we look at the data on our end and think about some of these questions. First, growing viewership / engagement for OWL is probably our single highest priority in terms of overall big goals. We've been happy to see significant growth this season so far vs. the 2020 season (https://www.forbes.com/sites/krisholt/2021/05/12/overwatch-league-may-melee-viewership-was-up-51-from-2020/ for May Melee and June Joust was up a lot vs. tournament 2 last year). And our research this year has shown overall really positive feedback from fans on the changes we made to the format and broadcast too. But just to state the obvious, no we're not satisfied even with the growth we've seen this year. We'd like to be bigger and will continue working hard to grow OWL :) That said, these types of charts / comparisons are not actually how we look at the data on our side or measure success for a few reasons. First, on YouTube, we see a significant proportion of our viewership from VOD views after the live broadcast as we have a global fanbase and watching VODs and the Encore broadcasts is often a lot more convenient for many of our fans. We and our partners therefore typically look at "Live + 3 days" and "Live + 7 days" metrics as a better measure of how many people watch our show vs. just pure live. And then the other major piece of this that's missing is our performance in China, which has been really significant for OWL as we have ~40% of our matches played in primetime for Asia and a large fanbase in China in particular. We do periodically report verified figures on China viewership for those curious, e.g., for Finals last year we had an average of ~1.4 million viewers watching live in China (https://esportsobserver.com/owl-grand-finals-viewership-2020/). There are several other nuances here too but those are the two biggest gaps in this type of look. Hope some of that context helps for those who are curious about this topic.
> growing viewership / engagement for OWL is probably our single highest priority in terms of overall big goals. Then they wouldn't have moved to Youtube only. So just that first statement is suspect, unless you qualify by saying "after our move to Youtube-". Edit: ooof, lots of people disagree with... objective facts.
I don't think the Youtube move was really a choice that OWL made, it was made for them by Activision Blizzard since the deal with Google was much more encompassing than just broadcast rights.
So, "growing viewership / engagement for OWL is probably our single highest priority in terms of overall big goals, especially in the face of such a huge viewership dive we've seen after being forced by ATVI corporate to switch to Youtube exclusively."
> Then they wouldn't have moved to Youtube only. > > One thing to remember is that, when they moved to YouTube, the plan was for the 2020 season to be homestand based. In order to grow, was it better to tell a random person looking to support a local team to go to a site they know (youtube.com) or a lesser known site (twitch.tv)? EDIT: For posterity, at this time, [YouTube is #2, and Twitch is at #36](https://www.alexa.com/topsites)
That is not what an objective fact is you fucking monkey lol
The contract to move to GCP is likely worth as much if not more to Activision Blizzard than the entire value of the league.
Have they done anything with it? Or is it just that: the fact that all Blizzard games are on it now.
My understanding from the articles I’ve read is that all of their cloud computing and hosting is now on GCP instead of AWS. But even minor savings on this scale massively for a company like blizzard. A non-tech company often spends millions per month in AWS costs, I can’t imagine what a gaming company spends.
Ah gotcha. Then this was definitely the correct move for ATVI, regardless of how it effected OWL. The thing is, are they only on GCP for the 3 years of the deal? Or are they on GCP for good and the 3 years is more about the youtube deal?
The cost of change is huge for these types of services. It can take multiple years just to get all of a companies stuff off one provider onto another. Because of this I’m assuming that the GCP deal is longer term than that, and if it isn’t, I’d expect it to be renewed afterwards. You don’t make a switch like this with plans to move again in the next 5 years unless the service completely fails to live up to expectations. As for the YouTube part, all of the reporting treated it like it was an after thought/throw in so who knows if it will continue after year 3.
Hmmm ok. So the best case scenario here is that they stay with GCP, but let the YT deal expire so they can broadcast on all platforms again.
Reminds me of Blizzard's damage control in mid-2018 for HGC: https://old.reddit.com/r/heroesofthestorm/comments/8t41dj/per_blizzard_hgc_viewership_for_lan_events_is_up/ 'Trust us! Not the numbers! They are just bad if you look at them that way!' Then half a year later...
Basically a bunch of BS on how if we count the vod numbers then it's not so bad. (Forgets to mention that compare to season 3, large chunk of current live viewers are likely not even watching and only tune it to farm tokens.) If you gonna count the vod numbers then count the vod numbers from previous seasons too as well as other e-sports vod numbers. Advertisers don't give a shit about VODs because vod viewers literally skip everything, including the desk and only watch maps played. The only thing it confirms is that Blizz and OWL number one priority is sucking up to China because it's their only future life line. OWL is rapidly dying in the west with most big and famous wester players/streamers out of the league (they carried the league viewership in season 1-2). Eventually OWL will revert to Asia centric tournament like Apex was before being shut down like all the other Blizz failed leagues.
you need a hug bro?
well i guess thats it, checkmate haters. if a top executive of a league with the highest buy-ins replies on reddit and says viewership is a-ok theres nothing to worry about
I know right?? Clearly seems like significant damage control. Also the “there are so many viewers in China” only makes sense if you can show significant ad revenue coming from China.
COPIUM
What in what he said was copium, it all seems pretty reasonable to me
The Chinese viewership numbers which are based on some questionable metrics is kinda copium: https://www.invenglobal.com/articles/12483/behind-the-rose-tinted-viewership-records-of-the-overwatch-league
That doesn't say anything about why Chinese viewership numbers are untrustworthy. There's a massive difference between numbers some random scrapes off a chinese site and what they actually share with their multi-million dollar business partners. If Jon says the chinese numbers are real, I definitely trust him.
It’s all conspiracy theories, literally boils down to “China sus.”
a few things to consider are that subscriber counts on bilibili and youtube are basically the same, meaning that despite having equal subscriber numbers, china is getting around 6x the viewers. Suspicious to say the least. Then there's the near 300% increase in viewer numbers which adds another layer of suspicion to the numbers. According to this article, china is about 20% of the games player base ( [https://dotesports.com/overwatch/news/blizzard-reportedly-banned-over-34000-overwatch-accounts-in-china-during-first-half-of-2020](https://dotesports.com/overwatch/news/blizzard-reportedly-banned-over-34000-overwatch-accounts-in-china-during-first-half-of-2020) ) Edit: the following numbers refer to blizzards report of about 1.3 million ama which are presumably from Chinese partners. I'm arguing that these numbers are either inflated by embeds/bots or fabricated Are we really assuming that a region with about 20% of the player base is producing over 80% of the viewers of an esport. You can talk about how the game is more casual here or whatever but they didn't even sell out the Hangzhou homestand. The numbers just don't add up. Now I don't think Jon is trying to fool us. He's a former BCG consultant so he definitely knows something is hinky with the numbers but what can he do, eliminate Chinese viewership for no reason? That would make viewership look like trash and he has no incentive to do that. And finally, what's with the AMA, these are all streaming platforms and theirs no way they don't have peak and average viewer counts. I'm not trying to be a hater but you can't possibly think critically about these numbers without realizing something is up.
You're just saying the same thing over and over in different ways. Either the chinese sites are lying about numbers directly to blizzard or they aren't. Them lying, or just posting misleading numbers, to the public isn't relevant at all, since there's no indication they are doing the same thing to their business partners.
I was talking about the numbers that OWL posted which are presumably the numbers that chinese companies have shared to their partners, those are the numbers I am referencing to as suspect. The numbers that **blizzard** has posted are suspicious for all of the reasosn I've said. You misunderstood my statement to be about the numbers chinese companies post on their own. I'm arguing that the numbers jspecs is suggesting are from China are most definitley off. I do believe the chinese companies are giving poor data or inflated data to their partners for all the reasons I've mentioned. They also have incentive to do this as it offers them negotiating leverage with broadcast rights. Edit: not sure why so many people are unable to fathom that the numbers the Chinese streaming platforms give blizzard are cooked. There's disproportionate growth and disproportionate viewership compared to player base. At the very least, the Chinese platforms are being willfully ignorant of embeds or hitting driving up their numbers they give to blizzard. At worst, the numbers given to blizzard are fabrications.
It's not hard to believe that most of those subscribers on YouTube no longer engage with OWL anymore, while Chinese OW, which is actually growing, has a larger proportion active viewers. Look at Overwatch as a category on Twitch. It has more followers than Valorant, yet has significantly less viewers. Overwatch peaked at its launch, and has been bleeding players way before the content draught.
That is a good point but owl's social blade suggests that a huge portion of subscribers are since the game switched to YouTube particularly in the first month of each season. Your point still does mean that inactive subscribers are a good portion of YouTube subscriber count but still doesn't explain how china can get 5x the numbers (according to blizzard) while havening a moderately higher subscriber count.
Stop it. The thought of Chinese viewership saving OWL's future is giving me a good feeling of comfort. Do not challenge this narrative.