The first two minors of the Dota 2 2018\19 competitive season are already over. Now is the time to make a comparison, and today's subjects will be the DreamLeague Season 10 and The Bucharest Minor. In this article, we will show which one from this pair has managed to attract more broadcast viewers.
The first thing to note would be that the first event’s duration was a couple of days longer compared to the other one. This has applied to both the group stage and the playoff stage. In case of DreamLeague, both stages took an extra day to be completed, and the brackets were given a day and a half. At the same time, the Bucharest event has managed to pull it off while providing only a single day per group. According to the news popping up on the Internet shortly after, many players were not too fond of this approach.
Taking this into account, we should say that the season's first minor isn't doing that well. In many cases both the events show similar results, while having only small, occasional advantages one over the other. For example, Bucharest Minor has more viewers (on average) for the group stage broadcast – 63931 as compared to DreamLeague's 62501.
Compare in more detail, we can see that the first day of DL's tenth season overtakes its rival's figures by 6000 viewers, while the second day stays behind by only 2000 viewers. By large, this can be traced to the participation of OG, the current world champions. This was the advantage the DreamHack's tournament lacked.
A similar case can be argued for the Natus Vincere team, albeit these guys have shown their strength only in the finals – which also demonstrated the media influence of the "born to win" team. We will get into this a bit later.
After the group stage, the DreamLeague's situation improves, showing a significant advantage in the first days, along with the Grand Final. There is no doubt that the final match has enjoyed this much attention due to the "Yellow-Blacks". Once in a long while, the Ukrainian organization was able to enter the championship's decisive match, resulting in extra attention from the Russian-speaking community. Aside of this, the former champions of The International already had quite a reputation, allowing them to routinely gather a large audience even during the ordinary matches.
At the Romanian championship, the teams to meet in the finals were Gambit and EHOME. On the scale of worldwide community, both of these teams (even including the past DotA legends from EHOME) aren't really popular. Gambit players were essentially the dark horses of the tournament, with no public faith being put into them until the very finals. At the same time, when compared to the "red star" representatives of Na'Vi, the latter were spectated with much more interest: having 33% more spectators per game on average.
During the last season, the community's attention to the similar events was more or less on the same level, with the average figures exceeding those of the teams mentioned in this article. At the same time, the 2018\19 season has shown us higher peak figures, which essentially means that some matches have enjoyed major-like levels of interest, despite happening on lower-class events.
We can conclude that The Bucharest Minor went ahead in terms of the average viewtime figures. However, DreamLeague manages to outshine it by the peak figures instead, having its finals spectated by 239 thousand viewers. Both of these events show that the Dota 2 community is interested not only in the large-scale majors, but in the comparatively small-scale minors as well.
