LEC Spring 2023 loses thousands of viewers due to KOI and G2 Esports setbacks
The LEC Spring 2023 ended last weekend. European League teams competed for quota places for the Mid-Season Invitational 2023 and the LEC Finals 2023. The games were intense and interesting, but the Average Viewers number was still lower than in the Winter season. Esports Charts explains how this can be attributed to the results of the top teams and the lower activity of community casters.
LEC Spring 2023 Viewership Statistics
The LEC Spring 2023 matches accumulated 21.4 million Hours Watched. The Average Viewers number was 219K, and the Peak Viewers number reached 572K. The Grand Final between Team BDS and MAD Lions became the most popular match. The latter team also became the most popular by Hours Watched accumulated during the season.
English became the most popular broadcast language with 57% of the total Hours Watched and 297.9K Peak Viewers. French and Spanish are also among the Top 3 most popular languages. Combined, they accumulated about 32% of the total Hours Watched of the entire tournament.
Twitch racked up nearly 80% of the total Hours Watched of the entire tournament. As usual, the official LEC channels, otplol_, and ibai's personal channel top the most popular broadcasts. The latter mostly covered only his KOI team's matches, so he made it to the Top by Peak Viewers, but didn't reach the Top 3 by Hours Watched.
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Most popular teams on LEC Spring 2023 by average viewers
The list of the most popular LEC Spring 2023 teams has not changed much compared with the LEC Winter 2023 teams, but the AV number has decreased noticeably. According to this metric, the most popular team of the Spring season with its result, would not be able to enter the Top 5 of the Winter season.
Why has the LEC's Average Viewers number declined?
The European League of Legends viewership is very dependent on the media teams and their successes during the season. When G2 Esports, Fnatic, and now KOI do well, this attracts more fans, and the number of viewers increases. Other teams can't make up for it with their fan bases, even when they perform better.
The statistics on the most popular games of the season prove all of this. The Grand Final between MAD Lions and Team BDS took first place in the ranking with 572.3K PV, but these teams can by no means be called the league's main media contributors. Moreover, the Peak Viewers number of the second most popular game saw 136K fewer viewers. It wasn't even a playoff game, but a series between G2 Esports and KOI in the Group Stage.
At the LEC Spring 2023, almost all of the media teams dropped out very early. For example, Team Heretics didn't make it out of the group (and it ranked in the Top 4 by PV at the LEC Winter 2023), Fnatic and KOI dropped out in the second group stage, and G2 Esports dropped out of the split after the first round of the playoffs. The other teams performed better, but it was not enough to achieve high results.
Comparison of the LEC Winter 2023 and the LEC Spring 2023
The second reason for the decline in the AV number is the decline of the channel of ibai, the league's top community caster. Usually, the Spaniard covers only games of the KOI team he co-owns, but in the Spring season, KOI didn't make it to the playoffs. As a result, ibai streamed only 40 minutes of the Grand Final of all playoff games, which partly helped the series between Team BDS and MAD Lions gain a comparable Peak Viewers number to that of the Winter season. If ibai hadn't streamed that match, the result would have been significantly lower. It should be noted that the PV number on the ibai's channel during his broadcasts of the final was 58K viewers — in other words, the Spanish streamer added more than 10% of his PV number for the decisive match.
When we compare ibai's broadcasts during the LEC Winter 2023 and LEC Spring 2023, we see that his airtime dropped by almost 40%, his AV number on the broadcast dropped by almost 20%, and his Pv number dropped by 26%. All of this led to the total PV number of Spanish-language streams dropping from 178K to 131.4K. Due to the early elimination of Team Heretics and KOI, Spanish-language broadcasts accumulated 14.8% during the Spring Split compared to 16.8% of the total HW number in the winter tournament.
Top 5 most popular League of Legends leagues in the Spring season of 2023
Despite the drop in the AV number, the LEC still has one of the best viewerships of any of the other regional leagues. Of course, it's no match for the Korean LCK, but compared to the Brazilian, American, and Vietnamese leagues, the LEC's numbers are impressive — the European league is ahead of them in every metric.
The 2023 Mid-Season Invitational takes place May 2-21 in London at the Copper Box Arena. You can follow the tournament on our coverage page.
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