> Also for reference the last Superbowl was watched by 100M viewers.
Getting precise numbers for marquee sporting events is difficult, especially outside of the major US sports leagues, but the Super Bowl is on the shortlist for most-viewed single sporting event. Comparing only among US sports leagues, the Super Bowl has more viewers than the final game of the next several leagues combined--the next largest finals seems to have somewhere around 20M viewers.
By contrast, the smallest of the "big" US sports leagues can only manage around 5 million viewers for its final games.
At this point I don't think it's really "sports" event, I wouldn't be surprised if many people turn in just for it while not being interested for the rest of the year
How much sports game viewership is just TV's with the game on for background chatter, or people watching the Superbowl for the half-time show? I think viewer rewards is something to take into consideration (I certainly used to idle in OWL twitch streams for free skins) but I think it's a bit disingenuous to claim all of them are untrustworthy.
The difference is that people will be talking about football well after the game is over. There is SportsCenter, there are the blogs, the social media....all of these things matter to advertisers, perhaps even more than the base metric of how many were watching the live broadcast.
The post is about the economics of eSports. One of the big revenue sources is advertisers. The viewership numbers are inflated with low value incentived users so that the gaming companies can misrepresent their true audience size and get more advertising revenue
The problem with this take is that some of the advertisers in the esports scene like Intel and HyperX have been around for over a decade. I’d trust their marketing department /somewhat/ to also be taking engagement into account and not just viewer count.
It’s not until super recently that other brands have been going into esports advertising. Those newer brands, sure I can see them being lured by high viewer counts. But as an example, you can see the sponsors list in this page for the World Cyber Games 2005 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Cyber_Games_2005
Getting precise numbers for marquee sporting events is difficult, especially outside of the major US sports leagues, but the Super Bowl is on the shortlist for most-viewed single sporting event. Comparing only among US sports leagues, the Super Bowl has more viewers than the final game of the next several leagues combined--the next largest finals seems to have somewhere around 20M viewers.
By contrast, the smallest of the "big" US sports leagues can only manage around 5 million viewers for its final games.