What are the features of measuring the popularity of live streams on Chinese services?

Loading

China is one of the largest markets for streaming & gaming, which has especially grown in the pandemic. The national streaming market is valued at tens of millions of dollars, and there are already more than 700 million users of streaming services in the country, which is almost 70% of the total Internet audience of the country. Because of this, the viewership statistics of local platforms and individual broadcasts are extremely valuable, but it is impossible to calculate it correctly using open data, and here's why.

How do China's live streaming gaming services calculate viewership activity?

All well-known live streaming gaming services in the West, such as Twitch or YouTube Live, always display the number of viewers present on a stream at any given moment during a broadcast. Some companies update this data at different intervals and even count the number of viewers in different ways: YouTube, for example, does not consider those who watch integrated autoplay streams on third-party sites as viewers. But despite the differences, one thing is constant: these are the metrics of a stream's concurrent audience. As for many Chinese platforms, this is not the case.

The Heat metric does not correspond to the number of viewers watching the broadcast

Most of the popular streaming platforms in China that broadcast games and esports events (such as Huya and Douyu) do not show the number of viewers, but rather a quite abstract metric named The Heat (also known as "popularity index", "hot index", etc.) during broadcasts. This metric includes several variables, and no one, except the developers themselves, can name their exact number. For example, among other things, the metric is influenced by: 

• the number of active viewers at the moment of the broadcast, 

• the number of visitors to the channel over the time of the broadcast, 

• the duration of the broadcast, 

• the quantity of video content on the channel, 

• interaction with the content (various raffles, lotteries, etc.) 

The size of the concurrent audience on the broadcasts is only one of a dozen (or even more) parameters that determine The Heat, i.e., the "popularity" of the broadcast. In short, it is simply impossible to determine the actual number of viewers on broadcasts using open data.

Why does China use The Heat metric for broadcasts?

The main difference between the Chinese market and the West is that Chinese services compete for a gigantic, monolingual audience. This, among other things, puts special challenges to how the system for promoting broadcasts should work in such conditions. 

For example, Twitch is watched by people in dozens of countries, which makes it logical to recommend to viewers streamers who broadcast in the language they know. In the case of China, this approach will not work, which is why the country began to use The Heat metric for broadcasts: it helps to promote interesting little-known streamers more effectively, as they cannot compete with the top ones solely by the size of the concurrent audience.

Unverifiability of viewership data

The main problem with The Heat metric is that it lacks transparency. The industry has been speculating about inflated numbers on Chinese streaming platforms for years, and the lack of public data on audience size (except for company press releases) only adds fuel to the fire.

On the other hand, this metric appears to be extremely useful on paper, because it is less dependent on a concurrent audience number alone. On Twitch, you can often see fraudulent streams with an obviously inflated viewer count, but in the case of Chinese platforms it is not enough just to bring bots to the broadcast, because several metrics of viewership activity are taken into account at the same time.

A high online rate alone cannot guarantee a brand that its collaboration with a particular streamer will be successful. In short, with greater transparency, The Heat metric of broadcasts will be more illustrative, and therefore useful — for sponsors as well.