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Riot Games has released viewership metrics for its League of Legends World Championship (Worlds 2019) finals, which took place on Nov. 10th. The developer reports that the final match of its month-long international competition, which pitted European favorite G2 Esports against China’s FunPlus Phoenix, reached 21.8M global average-minute-audience (AMA), peaking at 44M concurrent viewers.
Riot and Activision Blizzard have been at the forefront of a move to standardize AMA as the primary metric for measuring esports viewership. Both publishers have partnered with Nielsen in this effort; Activision Blizzard first in 2018; with Riot announcing its partnership earlier this year.
AMA measures the average audience at any given moment in a broadcast, and is the number most closely comparable to standard Nielsen ratings. As ESL CMO Rodrigo Samwell told Sports Business Journal earlier this year, AMA serves as a tool to “compare multiple events and tournaments with each other.”
Activision Blizzard began reporting AMA figures in 2018, and recently announced a global AMA of 1.12M for the 2019 Overwatch League Grand Finals.