The International 10: most detailed statistics of day one and comparison with Worlds 2021

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On October 7, The International 10 - the main Dota 2 tournament of the year - started. Earlier we published the main results from the first day of the tournament, but now we're ready to share more detailed statistics. A comparison with TI9, how much the official streamers are more popular than community casters, and some parallels with Worlds 2021 are in the new Esports Charts article.

Disclaimer: Data doesn't include statistics from Chinese streaming platforms!

Despite the tournament's many problems, The International is already having more viewers than the last event in the series. On the first day of TI9, the average number of prime-time broadcast viewers was about 600-650K people, while at TI10 the numbers increased by approximately 30-35%.

The reasons for the increase are obvious. First, Dota 2 fans have been waiting for the championship for more than two years; second, viewers can now get in-game bonuses in the form of Battle Pass points and a new treasure chest for watching broadcasts on Twitch; and finally, the new event series is held at a convenient time for European viewers: TI9 was held in China and most games started when it was night/early morning in Europe.

The International 10 matches take place at the same time as the tournament's main competitor, Worlds 2021. We compared how the viewers of both championships changed during the first day of the TI group stage.

The start of TI10 took place on the third day of the Worlds 2021 Play-In. The League of Legends World Championship games started when TI was already in full swing. The number of Worlds 2021 day 3 viewers was growing smoothly; at some point Worlds outpaced TI in viewers and held the leading position till the end of the matches.

Did TI manage to take viewers away from Worlds?

As we recently found out, Worlds has little chance of losing a large number of its viewers to The International, but of the three Play-In game days the third one was the least successful in terms of Peak Viewers and Average Viewers.

The Average Viewers of the 2021 World Championship day 3 dropped by 16% compared to day 2. In terms of Peak Viewers, the event also dropped by almost 15%. Surely, the major reason for this is that Korean team Hanwha Life Esports skipped the game day as it already qualified for Play-In round 2, but we still can’t exclude the possibility of TI effect either.

It is noteworthy that on the third day of Play-In, the one and only Worlds participant from the CIS, Unicorns of Love, lost their chance to qualify for the group stage of the championship. This means that it is very likely that a significant part of Russian-speaking Worlds viewers will now focus on The International.

Also read: Worlds vs. TI and CS:GO Major: How Will They Share the Audience?

Both Worlds and TI provide viewers with in-game gifts for watching streams on Twitch. However, statistics show that League of Legends fans are less interested in bonuses than Dota fans. On Day 1 of TI / Day 3 of Worlds, it was the Dota 2 Championship that led by the number of unique authorized viewers on Twitch.

However, looking at the approximate numbers of unique viewers, we can see that Worlds 2021 is rapidly pulling ahead. While in the case of Dota, there were 30% fewer authorized users than unique viewers, in the case of League of Legends the difference is as much as 56%. And this is a typical situation for the Riot Games’ discipline.

The phenomenon of TI's community casters

Traditionally, in addition to the official studios, The International matches are also broadcasted in different languages by community casters: former professional players, streamers and commentators/analysts who have not received invites to the tournament. Such broadcasts are usually very popular with the Dota esports core viewers.

For comparison, we took the two major languages of The International 10 broadcasts - Russian and English. The number of authorized viewers of official English-language broadcasts on Twitch was approximately 47% higher than the Russian-language viewers. However, in the case of the community casters the situation is the opposite, and here the viewers of Russian-language unofficial streams is 40% higher than the English-language viewers.

Looking at the total viewers of official and unofficial broadcasts in two languages, there is a very interesting trend: while the English-speaking viewers pay much more attention to the main tournament streams, in the CIS the difference is much less obvious. For example, on the first day of TI the number of official streams' viewers was only 60 thousand unique authorized viewers more, and those who watched both broadcasts were about 50% of both groups! 

The number of viewers on the first day of The International 10 was approximately 30-35% more than during the TI9 debut matches, due to the long break in the series, the Twitch gifting system and the more convenient match times for the European viewers. At the same time the tournament showed comparable numbers with Worlds 2021 in terms of viewers, but we should remember that the most popular LoL teams haven't started playing at the World Championship yet.