BLAST Premier Spring 2023 had fewer viewers than last year — how did it happen?

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BLAST Premier Spring 2023, the first tier-1 CS:GO tournament of the year, ended on January 29 in Copenhagen. Twelve teams from Europe and North America competed for a quota place in the season finale. The Esports Charts team has calculated the tournament's audience and found that the number of tournament viewers decreased noticeably over the year.

BLAST Premier Spring 2023 saw the world's top teams competing for six slots at the BLAST Premier: Spring Final 2023 season finals. Team Vitality, FaZe Clan and G2 Esports, the winners of the Group Stage, received three of them. The remaining three quotas were contested in the Play-In stage, and they went to Heroic, Astralis and Natus Vincere. 

Viewership Statistics 

BLAST Premier Spring 2023 matches accumulated 13 million Hours Watched and drew 152.5K Average Viewers. The event saw 398.2K Peak Viewers at the first match between Natus Vincere and G2 Esports in the Group Stage. 

Natus Vincere became the most popular team of the tournament. Its matches amassed 4.4 million Hours Watched. As for the Average Viewers number at matches, the leader is G2 Esports.

English became the most popular language at BLAST Premier Spring 2023 again, accounting for 65.5% of total HW and reaching 256.3K PV. Russian (14.1%) and Portuguese (9.2%) are also in the Top 3. More than 40 channels streamed the tournament, and the most popular of them was the official English-language Twitch channel blastpremier, it had 5.6 million HW and 157.7K PV. Gaules had the biggest audience among the non-studio channels (31.9K PV). 

Comparison with last year's event

BLAST Premier Spring 2023 is significantly behind last year's event by all key metrics. The number of HW is 29% down, the AV number is 42% down, and the PV number is almost 26% down.

What caused such a drop in metrics? First, we should note the broadcast languages: English broadcasts saw a slight increase in PV, but almost all other broadcasts saw a significant drop. For example, the Russian-language stream of BLAST Premier Spring 2022 was watched by almost 179K PV, while in 2023 this number dropped to 84K. The main reason here is the change of the coverage studio (the tournament was covered by Relog Media instead of WePlay).

In 2022, Portuguese broadcasts had 121K PV, but now it dropped to 37K. The reason is that BLAST Premier Spring 2023 had no Brazilian teams at all, which is a key trigger for local fans' activity. Brazilian fans always actively watch their teams' matches, even if they are outsiders, but they have little interest in the top foreign teams.

The Vietnamese broadcasts saw a decline in Peak Viers from 69K to 8.8K, primarily due to the lack of the NimoTV streaming platform, which was shut down in 14 countries because of financial problems. Spanish and French also saw a decline, however, not so dramatic. On the contrary, the number of viewers in Ukrainian grew. In 2022, there were only a couple of hundred Peak Viewers, whereas in 2023, the number was 14.3K.

Next BLAST event of the new season will be the Spring Showdown regional tournaments for Europe and North America. They will take place online on April 12-16. THe teams will compete for the last slots at BLAST Premier: Spring Final 2023. The final tournament of the spring season will be held in June in Washington, D.C., offering $450K and a quota for BLAST Premier: World Final.