Chats Activity on PGL Arlington Major 2022 - Which Broadcast Chats were the Most Active

Esports Charts team has analyzed the chat activity on the Twitch channels that broadcast PGL Arlington Major 2022, one of the largest Dota 2 tournaments of the year. We have calculated the number of active viewers, and also found out where they had the most lively discussions: on the official broadcasts or on the streams hosted by the community casters.

Official Streams and Community Casters

PGL Arlington Major matches were broadcast in Russian on 20 community casters’ channels. They totaled 9.4 million Hours Watched. The Average Viewers number was 85.6K people, and the Peak Viewers number reached 228.5K people.

The total number of Unique Authorized Users on the PGL Arlington Major community casters’ channels was 746K people. At the same, time the number of active chatters was 132.6K, which accounted for 17.7% of their total number.

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In second place by audience reach was the four official English-language channels by PGL. Together they accumulated 8.5 million Hours Watched, drew 79.9K Average and 152.4K Peak Viewers. There were just over 663.5K authorized users, but only 57.1K (8.6%) actively chatted.

The official Russian-language broadcast by BetBoom also had up to four simultaneous streams. They accumulated 3.6 million Hours Watched, attracted 34K Average and 93.9K Peak Viewers. The number of authorized users was 432.4K, but only 11.9K people were chatting, which made up only 2.7% of the total number. This is the lowest percentage of audience activity among all the channels we have analyzed.

The PGL Arlington Major's English-language community casting was hosted on 18 different channels, which together totaled 1.8 million Hours Watched. They had 16.4K Average and 32.5K Peak Viewers. Despite the fact that the community casters had only 284K unique viewers, more than 44.4K of them were actively chatting. This amounted to 15.6% of the total number of users, the second highest rate of audience activity among the analyzed channels.

The Ukrainian-language PGL Arlington Major stream was hosted on five channels by Maincast. They have the lowest coverage of all the channels we have analyzed: 760K Hours Watched, 7K Average Viewers and 16.6K Peak Viewers. At the same time, audience activity on the Ukrainian-language streams was higher than on the official Russian-language broadcasts. There were 6.3K out of 114K unique viewers in chats, or 5.6% of the total number, who interacted with each other. On BetBoom channels this figure was two times lower.

But what conclusions can be drawn from this data? First of all, the audience of the community casters is more active on their streams than on official broadcasts. They chat more often and more willingly on their favorite streamers’ channels, and this is true for the broadcasts in both major languages — Russian and English. Second, based on the numbers, the key Russian-speaking audience was clearly unfamiliar with the little-known BetBoom channels, so they preferred to discuss the tournament on the familiar community-casters’ channels.

Most Popular Channels

Considering the most popular channels in detail, pgl_dota2, the official English-language channel of the tournament, ranks first by audience coverage. It had 7.1 million Hours Watched, and the number of unique authorized users amounted to 624K people. Of these, about 52.9K — or 8.47% — were chatting.

The second largest audience coverage goes to the channel of the Russian streamer Nix — he had 5.2 million Hours Watched. At the same time, the number of active chatters on Nix's channel accounted for 9.6%, or 43.6K people out of 451.2K unique users. We should note that Nix viewers were the most "talkative". They sent more than 1.4 million messages during the broadcasts, which is the highest result in the Top-5 channels.

Third place goes to betboom_ru, which had an official Russian-language broadcast. It was watched by 411K unique viewers, of which only 10.4K (2.53%) actively chatted. Audience activity there was the lowest of the Top 5 channels by coverage. Viewers of betboom_ru sent in the chat a little more than 100.4K messages, which was also the lowest number in the Top.

The channel of the Russian streamer NS took fourth place in the Top with 2.9 million Hours Watched. He had 354K unique authorized users, and 43.1K active chatters. This is approximately 12.1% of the total number of viewers.

Fifth place among the most popular PGL Arlington Major channels goes to the channel of the Swedish streamer Gorgc. It is interesting that this channel had the lowest audience coverage among the channels in the Top 5 — 1.3 million Hours Watched. However, the Gorgc channel had the highest chat activity. Almost 13% of its viewers were writing messages while watching the broadcast (27.1K out of 210K). Gorgc fans are only slightly behind Nix viewers by the number of messages.

Chat Dynamics

We have analyzed the dynamics of activity in chats in the above-mentioned channels and made some interesting conclusions.

As you can see from the chart, on August 8, almost all channels saw a decline in chat activity. This was the last day of the group stage, on which only the final four series were played. In comparison, 16 matches were played on the other days. More matches means longer airtime, which means higher chat activity.

NS and Nix channels had their peak activity of viewers on August 9, the first game day of the playoffs. On this day (more precisely, on the night of August 9-10), there was a derby between Team Spirit and Outsiders. Apparently, Russian-speaking fans were especially active in this period, as the percentage of chatters on the Nix channel rose to 9.9% and on the NS channel to 11.4%.

The peak activity of viewers on the Gorgc broadcast was on August 10 — on this day, about 14.3% of the channel's unique viewers were chatting on the channel. The reason for such growth can be attributed to the fact that Gorgc hosted almost every broadcast with invited guests, and on that day he had two of them at once — s4 and pieliedie. Moreover, it was the second day of the playoffs, with important elimination games featuring Evil Geniuses and Team Liquid, both popular in the West.

On August 14, the final day of the playoffs, some channels also saw peaks of activity. For example, Gorgc (13.8% of active chatters), just_ns (9.7%) and betboom_ru (2.11%, a record peak on the channel).

***

Chat analytics helped us come to the conclusion that viewers communicate much more actively on broadcasts of independent casters compared to official streams. At the same time the difference between studios and community casters can reach huge values in regards to individual languages, as can be seen in the example of Russian. The chat conversion of independent streamers is extremely high, which can be extremely useful for brands and sponsors.