Hearthstone Esport’s viewership took a big hit as soon as they switched their platform. While in Twitch average viewership of live events was 40k viewers throughout the whole day, with a peak of 56k.
Since joining Youtube the average viewership of Hearthstone went down almost 85%. Hearthstone fans are mad cause there was 0 advertisement for it so it makes complete sense. Hardcore fans are saying that most of the casuals don’t even know which platform it is on right now.
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Lack of marketing aside many pointed out the fact that Youtube doesn’t have the same omnipresent casual audience for live streams. The process of watching live stream content on Youtube is not at the same level as Twitch.
Twitch has a dedicated audience only dedicated only for streaming content. This gives twitch a huge advantage in terms of viewership cause all the eyeballs are there.
In youtube, you have to be subbed to Hearthstone’s official channel first. After that, if the youtube algorithm decides to send you the notification in your sub feed only then you might check this out. This created confusion as a more casual audience had no idea about the event.
Many analysts are saying that Hearthstone Esports has literally 5% of the hype and committed audience that Overwatch League has, and has never really been a thing when it comes to the big boys of Esports.
Many fans think that Youtube should do a stronger marketing push for these live events. As stream wars began late last year all the big boys are competing for people’s eyeballs as much as they can. Looks like exclusive stream deals won’t slow down any time soon.
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