Top co-casters of Worlds 2024: how co-casting helped League of Legends to set a viewership record
The official introduction of co-casting to the League of Legends World Championship series in 2023 has completely changed how global fans watch the tournament. Fans of League of Legends come from all corners of the globe, and Worlds 2024’s viewership results are a testament as to how co-casting has helped Riot Games expand its reach in critical, growing regions for the esports industry, as well as strengthen their historically strong audiences.
In a recent article published before Worlds 2024’s final game, we analysed how the viewership for the series has evolved across the years, including how co-casting has changed since its official integration in 2023. However, now that Worlds 2024 is behind us, we can also explore the top co-casters of the event.
Worlds 2024 was a record-breaking tournament. The final of Worlds 2024 set a new esports viewership record of 6.94M concurrent viewers, but not in the same manner as last year’s event. The Worlds 2023 set the previous record of 6.4M viewers, largely thanks to Korean audiences, which made up over 2M of these concurrent viewers. These fans were largely cheering for T1 and Faker, who achieved another world championship after a dry spell since 2016.
Worlds 2024 did not experience the same explosive wave of Korean fans for the finals between T1 and Bilibili Gaming, but it reached new esports records in key demographics, which helped it to overcome last year’s massive peak. Of course, the introduction of co-casting has been detrimental for the viewership of official broadcasts in some key audiences. While viewership grew for Worlds 2024, not all channels enjoyed growth.
Since co-casting was introduced in 2023, it’s clear that the official English-language RiotGames broadcast on Twitch has suffered massively. In fact, the introduction of co-casting in 2023 actually negatively affected the overall viewership of the Worlds event. With broadcasting shaken up, viewership drops for the official channels outpaced the growth of co-casters and caused an overall negative watch time dynamic, despite the event recording an esports record for peak viewership. YouTube-based official broadcasts were not as strongly affected as their Twitch peers, but they still suffered with the introduction of co-casting.
2024 has seen Worlds’ viewership stabilise. While official channels are less popular, they are not recording massive viewership drops as some did in 2023, and co-casters have only continued to grow. Nevertheless, the official RiotGames channel recorded its lowest PV since 2018, a testament to the knock-on effects of integrating co-casting.
This year marked record total viewership for many of the top co-casters at Worlds. Many channels recorded new personal peak viewership records, but in general, all the top co-casters enjoyed millions of hours of watch time, significantly outperforming their previous 2023 viewership.
As we can see in the year-on-year total viewership for the Worlds series, 2024 marked rapid growth, leading to the most-watched Worlds event ever. This growth in viewership this year came almost entirely from co-casters, who contributed far more viewership to the event’s total, whereas official broadcasts remained largely stagnant. Not only have historically strong audiences in League of Legends, like English, Spanish, and Korean, recorded strong co-casting results, but it has also helped to accelerate the growth of smaller, growing audiences for the esports title.
Worlds 2024 saw Vietnamese, Chinese-speaking, and Portuguese-language viewership increase massively. While these languages are popular through official broadcasting channels, major co-casters for each demographic have helped these audiences become massive parts of Worlds 2024’s total viewership: in 2024, Vietnamese broadcasts achieved 79% of the watch time reached by Korean ones. With these new major audiences boosting Worlds 2024’s watch time, they were well represented in the top co-casters for the event, too.
Caedrel was the most-watched co-caster at Worlds, having achieved 17.02M Hours Watched, and 372K Peak Viewers, a new channel record for the Twitch broadcaster. Not only has he managed to overtake ibai as the most-watched co-caster for the event, but Caedrel was also the most-watched English-language broadcast for the entirety of Worlds 2024.
Ibai, an internet sensation and previous professional LoL caster, reached 11.59M Hours Watched, making up roughly 80% of the total Spanish-language viewership for Worlds 2024. The Spanish broadcaster is massively popular, and he has only continued to establish his presence in the community in 2024; while ibai reached an overall peak viewership higher than Caedrel, the British broadcast was watched more on average throughout the event, with an average viewership almost 50K viewers higher than ibai.
In Brazil, Baiano was also massively popular, reaching 7.33M Hours Watched across his two broadcasts on YouTube and Twitch. While Baiano was not as popular as ibai or Caedrel, he still established himself as the top Portuguese-language broadcaster of the event, as did the other two major co-casters for their respective languages.
Korean audiences are different to the other major demographics for Worlds. Since the introduction of co-casting in 2023, Korean viewers still majorly prefer to watch the games through official broadcasting channels, although some Korean co-casters did find success in 2024. 울프 (Wolf) and 김민교. (phonics1) were the leading co-casters for Koreans across two major Korean livestreaming platforms, Naver’s CHZZK and SOOP Korea (formerly AfreecaTV). While they did not match the 20.6M HW achieved by the official LCK YouTube Channel, they both increased their viewership compared to 2023, including Wolf, who hosted his first Worlds broadcasts from Naver’s CHZZK.
Vietnamese viewership for co-casters has massively exploded in size compared to 2023. Top broadcaster Hoàng Luân maintained his place as the country’s top co-caster by increasing his viewership by almost 2M Hours Watched. Otherwise, he would have been overtaken by Thầy Giáo Ba, who has built up a sizeable regional following as a VCS co-caster.
Văn Tùng made this list 30% full of Vietnamese broadcasters, with him setting a new personal PV record during the Finals. Vietnamese audiences have noticeably increased their share of total non-official viewership, with Vietnamese streams now accounting for 17.2% of total co-casting watch time.
Other smaller European audiences were also represented in the latter spots of our ranking. German streamer and former professional tolkin was the most-watched German-langauge co-caster with 3.67M Hours Watched, and streamer and Karmine Corp founder Kamet0 was the most-watched French-language co-caster with 2.4M Hours Watched.
Similar to Caedrel, Baiano, Hoàng Luân, and Văn Tùng, tolkin recorded a new channel record for peak viewership during Worlds 2024. Baiano was the odd one out here, as his YouTube peak viewership was not reached during the Finals of the event, but rather during T1’s match against paiN Gaming during the group stage, with plenty of passionate Brazilian fans showing up to support their local team against the legendary T1.
All in all, these top co-casters represent the top level of esports viewership. Many of these popular streamers recorded new viewership records during Worlds 2024, except for international celebrities like Kamet0 and ibai; this helped Worlds 2024 to become the most-watched iteration of the series. Worlds 2024 increased its watch time by 30% compared to last year, and co-casting has grown by over 81% this year.
Vietnamese and Brazilian audiences continue to prove their worth for Worlds 2024, with Vietnamese broadcasts even reaching over 1.1M Peak Viewers during the finals, a new esports record for Vietnamese broadcasting. International English-speaking audiences also continued to grow for Worlds 2024, with co-casting now accounting for 40% of the total watch time for this major audience.
Without co-casting, Worlds 2024 would have missed out on 87.5M Hours Watched. The introduction of co-casting has already proven its worth to Riot Games, with it directly causing the highest watch time for any Worlds edition. Compared to the lengthy history of League of Legends in esports, co-casting is a relatively new idea to the discipline, and it will continue to evolve and contribute massively to the broadcasting of both League of Legends and the overall esports industry.
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