ESL One Stockholm Major 2022: Most Popular Teams & Impact of Community Casters

ESL One Stockholm 2022, which became the first big LAN event since the start of the pandemic with live spectators in attendance, ended at the end of last week. Earlier we covered general results of the championship, and now it’s time to overview the most popular teams & streams.

Most Popular Teams and Regions

On their way to title OG had to advance through the lower bracket of playoffs with no room for mistake. The team attended the event with substitutes: Ceb took the 5th position instead of captain Misha, and n0tail was a coach instead of Chuvash. The young OG roster has been very popular with the audience before, and the presence of two two-time TI champions in the roster only fueled the interest of the audience. The team became the most popular at ESL One Stockholm 2022, gathering 229K viewers at their matches on average.

TSM FTX, which took second place in the tournament, followed OG by the metric. The average audience of its matches reached 198.9K viewers. The top 5 by the indicator also includes current TI champions Team Spirit, Fnatic and BetBoom Team. On average, these teams were followed by 171K-181K Average Viewers.
Europe has become the most popular region of ESL One Stockholm 2022, as matches of local teams gathered 180.2K spectators on average. Indicators of the CIS, North America, South America and Southeast Asia squads were lower by 2%, 6%, 13% and 24%, respectively.

Contribution of community casters

In total, ESL One Stockholm 2022 matches have amassed more than 28 million Hours Watched. 57% of the total were collected on official broadcasts, and 43% were achieved thanks to community casters. Note that unofficial broadcasts are extremely important in Dota 2 viewership, unlike, for example, another popular Valve discipline, CS:GO.

English-language esl_dota2 channel became the leader of the official coverage in all respects, where the studio broadcast all the most hype matches. It collected 9.3 million Hours Watched, 83.4K Average Viewers and 267.8K Peak Viewers. The second ESL channel is in third place, having collected almost 8 times less HW.

The main Maincast channel with broadcasts in Russian, dota2mc, took second place in the top, having collected 3.72 million Hours Watched. The second channel of the studio placed 5th with 280.4K HW. The only official YouTube channel to make it into the top 5 was Spanish-language ESB_Dota2 with 555K Hours Watched.

The most popular community caster of ESL One Stockholm 2022 was the Russian-speaking streamer just_ns, who broadcast the playoffs in a studio format with invited guests and various activities. In total, he managed to collect 2.24 million Hours Watched, the third place in the overall standings of channels.

In second place is another Russian-speaking creator, Nix, who collected 1.27 million Hours Watched, spending almost 2 times less time on air than just_ns. It is worth noting that the average and peak audiences of these streamers are almost identical.

Professional player Gorgc, who broadcasts in English, came in third with 828.2K Hours Watched. Indonesian YouTube channel WxC and the Spanish-language ImperiusCast from Facebook Gaming are also in the top 5.

Comparison of Russian- and English-language community broadcasts

The most popular broadcast languages for ESL One Stockholm 2022 were English and Russian. In total, English-language streams collected 11.9 million Hours Watched. At the same time, the contribution of official ESL broadcasts was almost 90%, and the contribution of the community was only 10%.

In the Russian-language segment the situation is completely different. Of the 9.1M Hours Watched, 55% came from community casters and 45% came from official Maincast broadcasts.

Gorgc became the undisputed leader among the English-speaking community casters. At the same time, his watch time was 3.5 times higher than the combined indicator of admiralbulldog and ephey who following him by the metric.

Just_ns and Nix became the best in the Russian-speaking segment. In third place is the YouTube channel “Аналитика Ошибок”. Its broadcasts throughout ESL One Stockholm 2022 were able to collect almost 320K Hours Watched, despite the fact it was inferior to many other channels in terms of average audience.