StarLadder
and ImbaTV’s Dota 2 Minor last week pulled in more than 1M hours watched on StarLadder’s main Twitch channel, down from the last time the organizer hosted a Dota 2 Minor.
The event at Cybersport Arena in Kiev, Ukraine, spanned March 7-10 with eight teams vying for an automatic bid in the DreamLeague Season 11 Major beginning this week. The prize pool for the event was $300K USD, and the tournament was the third of five Minors scheduled for the 2018-2019 season.
Total coverage of the event on Twitch averaged 10.3K CCV over a total of 89.97 hours of airtime, but live sessions averaged more than 20K CCV. The final live session of coverage on Sunday averaged 30.2K CCV, with a peak of 54.62K for an 8.37-hour long stream.
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In addition to the main StarLadder stream, which is a Russian-language channel, the tournament was aired on StarLadder’s English language channel for Dota 2 as well as ImbaTV in China.
The English-language channel didn’t reel in quite the same viewership as the primary channel, but it still managed to average 9.5K CCV and rack up 810.73K hours watched over 85 hours of airtime.
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For comparison, overall coverage of the last Dota 2 Minor this year (the Bucharest Minor) on event organizer PGL’s main channel for coverage reeled in 1.7M hours watched with an average of 14.34K CCV peaking at 62.91K. While the event had a much larger hours watched total than this past week’s Minor, PGL airtime – including peripheral coverage – was 115 hours for the week, about 25 more hours than StarLadder.
Notable sessions for the event averaged around or above 25K CCV and the final day of live coverage on Jan. 13 averaged just over 40K CCV across eight hours of airtime.
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During the 2017-2018 season, Dota 2 esports operated under a slightly different format and there were more than just five Minor events, but the last Minor that StarLadder and ImbaTV hosted together was the StarLadder ImbaTV Invitational Season 5. That eight-team event was also at CyberSport Arena in Kiev featuring a $300K prize pool from April 10-14.
For that event, StarLadder’s two Twitch channels each averaged close to 18K CCV with StarLadder1 peaking at 86.98K during the finale on April 14.
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The event produced 1.64M hours watched on StarLadder 1 and 1.27M hours watched on StarLadder’s English-language channel for Dota 2. Those channels each only aired 78.47 and 63 hours, respectively. The top live sessions for the event averaged 35K CCV and most live game broadcasting sessions averaged more than 23K CCV.
