HOW MANY VIEWERS WATCHED THE LEAGUE OF LEGENDS 2017 FINALS? NOT 60M
TNL Take: Since The Next Level launched its weekly look into the Twitch Top 10, League of Legends has dominated primarily due to the 2017 World Championships occurring over the past month.
Last year, Riot Games put out an infographic stating that the 2016 World Championship drew 46M Unique Users.
This year, Riot has not (yet) released their 2017 Viewership numbers - however during parent company Tencent's earnings call, the Chinese behemoth revealed that "unique viewers more than doubled" to 60M.
So how many viewers did the Finals actually reach? Let's do some easy math.
Here are the Global numbers courtesy of Esportscharts.com:
HOLY CRAP 100M! Ok, let's slow down for a second.
As this analysis is being done for Non-Chinese viewership, let's focus on those data points. Here's more from Esportscharts.com:
The biggest stat in the 1st column is total time watched at 70M+ hours excluding Chinese Viewers. By taking the total hours watched (70M+) divided by the total number of hours broadcast (136) that gives us an Average Concurrent Viewership of ~517,000.
That matches almost exactly the ~519,000 CCV reported as well.
While half a million users is a far cry from the 60M "total unique users" reported during the earnings call, it's still a very strong viewership figure for non-Chinese viewers only and why nothing comes close to League of Legends World Championship which remains the top viewed esports title.
Well done Riot Games.