Untapped potential – analyzing Finnish esports broadcasting channels using Twitch API data

Twitch, also known as “Twitch.tv”, is a live streaming platform where anyone can stream their live content to a worldwide audience. It’s mostly known for different types of gaming content, although non-gaming content has also gained a whole lot of popularity during the last few years. This series of blog posts focuses on gaming content – more specifically esports content – by analyzing the four biggest Finnish esports broadcasting channels on the platform: ElisaViihdeSport, Pelaajatcom, TES_csgo and yleeurheilu.

“Oh geez, that’s a lot of stuff to go through, why should I bother reading all of it?”

In this series, I’m trying to make interesting points about the most popular Finnish esports channels and their follower base. I’ll show that all those channels have a lot of room to grow, whether they keep broadcasting for a Finnish audience or expand to an international audience, which is naturally a lot bigger.

Hopefully, you’ll learn something new about esports and the broadcasting side of it, whether you have prior knowledge or not. I can assure you that I found things that I didn’t expect, even though I’m a former professional in the field. In any case, you’ll get to watch some numbers and graphs, not just a wall of text. Enjoy!

As an important disclaimer, I’ve had the pleasure to work with many of these broadcasters during my few years as an esports journalist. These channels were chosen because they consist of four different companies, they have more than 20000 followers and – to be frank – I had to narrow it down somewhere, so I ended up with these four channels. I have no strings attached to these channels and/or companies anymore, and they have not influenced anything in this text, except for doing esports broadcasts for the Finnish audience.

Before jumping to Finnish esports, it’s important to understand some things about Twitch and esports in general. This first post of the series focuses more on introducing these topics to someone, who hasn’t been that familiar with them.

What is Twitch and why should I care about it?

Twitch is one of the most popular live streaming platforms. According to them, seven million Twitch streamers go live every month, and there are users from over 230 countries. TwitchTracker data states that the all-time maximum number of concurrent viewers on Twitch was more than 6.5 million in January 2021. It’s a huge platform globally, but it’s really popular for Finnish viewers and Finnish content too. Twitchtracker data states that there are thousands of Finnish channels broadcasting every month.

Metaphorically speaking, it has replaced television for younger generations. While browsing Twitch at any time of day, there’s always live content to watch. You can switch effortlessly between different channels, but since the vast majority of content is completely free, you need to watch advertisements in between changing channels and sometimes during broadcasts.

Just like many other social media platforms, users of Twitch can “follow” other users, to get notified when their broadcast begins. At the moment, every Twitch user can follow 0-2000 channels. In addition to getting notifications, users can check manually which of their followed channels are live.

The more followers, the more people see that channel is live, hopefully luring them to watch it. The more concurrent viewers, the better for the broadcaster, because they appear higher in their followers’ list of live channels. The competition for viewers is fierce, and bigger channels tend to gain more views.

As expected, Twitch users are mostly just watching and chatting, instead of streaming to their channel. There are three types of accounts in Twitch:

• Regular: Every account is a regular account at first.
• Affiliate: First upgrade from a regular account after reaching specific milestones of streamed content and viewing numbers. Can receive money from monthly subscriptions and donations made using Twitch’s own “Bits” currency.
• Partner: The most wanted account status. Upgrade from Affiliate status, as the user gets “Verified” status and more perks than an affiliated user.

As a glance to 117000 Twitch users following ElisaViihdeSport, Pelaajatcom, TES_csgo or yleeurheilu: more than 95 % are regular users, about 4 % are affiliates and less than 0.5 % are partners. Nevertheless, if we sum the view counts of all their channels, more than 80 % consist of partners’ views, 14.5 % of affiliate channel views, and less than 4 % of the views were for regular accounts.

View count isn’t the best and most accurate metric for measuring a channel’s success, but it’s the only view-specific metric you’ll find from Twitch API. Luckily, it’s good enough to prove that views are heavily condensed towards partner accounts on Twitch, at least for this sample of users we are studying.

And why do we concentrate on just Twitch instead of Youtube or other live streaming platforms? Because Twitch is so popular for esports content, it’s almost like it has a monopoly of being “the esports broadcasting platform”.

What is esports and why should I care about it?

As a short introduction, esports is the concept of playing video games competitively. To add more details, esports consists of video games of all types, but the most important ones are competitive multiplayer games played with personal computers, gaming consoles and mobile devices.

Just like in traditional sports, some games are played individually (one versus one), some as teams of different sizes. The most popular esports titles like League of Legends and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive are team sports, played as five versus five, similarly to many traditional ball games. Esports tournaments and leagues are broadcasted like traditional sports, as they share many competitive aspects.

As a spectator sport, esports has huge business potential. According to Sponsor Insight, in the Spring of 2019 esports was “the most interesting sport” among Finnish men between ages of 18 and 29. In my opinion, the result might be a bit too flattering, because all different esports titles were combined and compared to single sports titles like football and ice hockey, but it’s still a sign of growing interest. Esports has a lot of potential, but there is still one huge puzzle to solve: monetization.

In traditional sports – at least for the most popular ones – viewers usually have some kind of monthly subscription to be able to watch live broadcasts. They are used to paying about tens of euros per month for watching their favorite sport. As it’s a monthly subscription, they watch when they have the time for it.

Even if they can’t watch everything, they are still paying customers. The viewing statistics aren’t neglected by broadcasting companies, but at the end of the day, the amount of paying customers is more important than the highest number of concurrent viewers. Of course, traditional sports need advertisement money too, but compared to esports, it’s a whole different ball game.

For esports broadcasts, the viewer numbers are everything, because all broadcasts are free to watch, and there are no signs for that to change in the future. Just like mentioned in the previous chapter, the more followers, the more concurrent viewers. The more concurrent viewers, the more money to be made from advertisements.

Some channels accept different types of optional donations (Twitch terms: “Subscriptions” and “Bits”), but at the moment they are not used as mandatory payments. Therefore, broadcasts are usually funded by partner companies who want attention for their products and services. There’s a long way to go to monetize esports broadcasts, but this blog series isn’t about that, so let’s not dig too deep into it.

One more thing to note about the competition between esports broadcasters. One could think that broadcasting companies of the same nationality would be the biggest competitors for each other. However, in the esports context, national channels battle most with the main broadcast of a tournament. As opposed to traditional sports, viewers can choose between multiple broadcasts and languages of the same tournament, even if the broadcasting company has bought exclusive rights for country or language.

Main channels – ESL_CSGO, BLASTPremier and DreamHackCS to name a few for a video game called Counter-Strike: Global Offensive or CS:GO – have more or less one million followers, and they tend to be highlighted on Twitch during their tournaments. None of the Finnish esports channels have reached even the milestone of 100,000 followers, meaning that many potential Finnish Twitch users might select English broadcasts purely because they are recommended, while Finnish channels need to be searched manually.

This blog series analyzes data about followers of the four biggest broadcasters of Finnish esports: Elisa, Pelaajatcom, Telia and YLE. Only one Twitch channel was analyzed for each of them, even though some of them have more than 10000 followers for their secondary channels too.

Honorable mentions that weren’t in the mix, but who would deserve some analyzing: Finnish Esports League, PUBG Finland and Kanaliiga.

The major players of Finnish esports broadcasting

First of all, it’s not just these four esports channels that have had remarkable Twitch numbers in Finland, but these four are the most interesting ones in my opinion. All of them have built most of their follower base using the success and popularity of Finnish CS:GO teams, especially ENCE during 2019-2020.

Three of four channels – ElisaViihdeSport, Pelaajatcom and TES_csgo – are owned by commercial companies, while yleeurheilu is run by Finland’s national public service media company Yleisradio Oy.

Pelaajatcom ownership is under a consulting company called North Empire Oy. ElisaViihdeSport and TES_csgo are in another league, as their owners are telecommunication giants Elisa Oyj and Telia Finland Oyj.

Channel	Owner	Created	Followers
ElisaViihdeSport	Elisa Oyj	5.4.2018	69341
Pelaajatcom	North Empire Oy	17.9.2018	67819
TES_csgo	Telia Finland Oyj	29.3.2019	32684
yleeurheilu	Yleisradio	16.1.2019	20377

To make the text more readable, I’ll ignore the actual and factual channel names and refer to ElisaViihdeSport as Elisa, pelaajatcom as Pelaajat, TES_csgo as Telia and yleeurheilu as YLE.

All the numbers in this series have been fetched from Twitch API, if not presented otherwise. It’s a public API that allows registered users to make 800 requests per minute for their endpoints. It’s important to note that a “follow” is wiped out of the Twitch database – or at least API – if a user unfollows a channel. What this means is that historical Twitch API data might be missing some follows here or there, because some followers have unfollowed the channel afterward.

Twitch API data is not the absolute truth about follower statistics, but it provides good insights about the content that makes Finnish Twitch users press that purple Follow button.

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Glossary

Quick little glossary to clear up some of these terms:

• User: Twitch account made for a person or company.
  Can stream on own channel, follow other users and chat during Twitch broadcasts. In this post, users aren’t considered as broadcasters or channels, even if they technically are those too.
• Channel: Twitch account of a broadcasting company
  Technically every user is also a channel and vice versa. In this text, I’ll present four broadcaster users as channels, while users that are following them, are presented as followers.
• Follower: In the context of this post: Twitch User that follows 1-4 of esports channels that are studied. Not all users are followers, but all followers are users. One user can follow up to 2000 channels on Twitch but usually follows less than 50 channels.
• Dedicated follower: A completely made-up term by myself. It represents a user, who follows only one of four channels that are studied in this blog post. In other words, a dedicated follower might follow up to 2000 channels on Twitch, but only one of them is either Elisa, Pelaajat, Telia or YLE. In other words, no “dedication” needed, might be just pure coincidence.

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Digging into user data – looking for new followers

Firstly, an important note to remember with all these numbers flying around: This chapter studies the following numbers of Twitch users that follow one to four Finnish esports channels. All other Twitch users are excluded, and on the other hand, all those four specific channels are studied, not just followers of one or two.

In total, these channels had 117049 unique Twitch users as their followers, when data was fetched from Twitch API 22.6.2021. Less than 9000 users (7.6 %) followed all four channels. Almost two thirds, 74783 users (63.9 %), followed only one of these four channels.

These numbers surprised me a lot. After all, at least in my perspective, all these channels have broadcasted similar esports content. In other words, all these channels have broadcasted both Finnish and international CS:GO tournaments featuring Finnish top teams.

If we take a closer look at this huge chunk of users following only one of four channels, we’ll find that they are mostly following either Elisa or Pelaajat. For the sake of clarity, I’ll call these users “dedicated followers”, since they aren’t following any of the other three channels that are inspected.

Not only Finnish CS:GO content draws followers

Some growth has been made with other than Finnish CSGO teams’ success. For Elisa, part of their dedicated followers seems to be gained through their broadcasts of PUBG esports tournaments.

Almost none of these followers have followed Pelaajat, Telia or YLE in addition to Elisa, which is most likely influenced by these two things:

• They followed during a PUBG tournament. Other channels aren’t broadcasting this video game that much.
• They followed the channel when the broadcast was made in English instead of Finnish. Other broadcasters have their productions only in Finnish.

Day	New dedicated followers	New other followers	New followers (Total)	Share of dedicated (%)
27/04/20	1361	20	1381	98.6
14/05/20	703	16	719	97.8
12/05/20	703	18	721	97.5
30/04/20	700	1237	1937	36.1
19/05/20	698	16	714	97.8
11/05/19	614	987	1601	38.4
20/05/20	576	13	589	97.8
21/05/20	476	14	490	97.1
20/04/20	410	31	441	93.0
20/09/20	390	8	398	98.0

Of course, the definition of “English-speaking esports broadcasts” is not that simple when we take a look at history books of Finnish esports broadcasting. If you’ve been following the scene for a while, you’re probably already asking: “But what about the 2019 Berlin Major rally English broadcasts by Pelaajat.com?”.

And that is definitely something we should inspect more closely.

Hämmentävä episodi CS-majorissa: Suomalainen selostus vaiennettiin, tilalle rallienglanti – siitä vasta riemu repesi https://t.co/onIErC58BM #esportsfi

— Ilta-Sanomat Esports (@ISesportsFI) August 29, 2019

Pelaajat couldn’t do their broadcasts in Finnish, because Telia owned exclusive rights for the Berlin Major 2019 tournament’s Finnish production. Pelaajat found a loophole around the exclusive broadcasting rights by making their broadcasts using broken English, as English broadcasts were not controlled as strictly as Finnish. They became a viral hit during the tournament and “rally English” made them known outside of Finland too.

Yes, Pelaajat gained thousands of followers during ‘rally English broadcasts, but not just dedicated followers. Almost 5000 followers of those 12 days have stayed as dedicated followers, but in addition to them, more than 4000 new followers have followed other Finnish esports channels as well.

Day	New dedicated followers	New other followers	New followers (Total)	Share of dedicated (%)
28/08/19	534	628	1162	46.0
29/08/19	1200	1162	2362	50.8
30/08/19	888	747	1635	54.3
31/08/19	691	448	1139	60.7
01/09/19	476	348	824	57.8
02/09/19	45	36	81	55.6
03/09/19	63	73	136	46.3
04/09/19	17	20	37	45.9
05/09/19	744	681	1425	52.2
06/09/19	74	62	136	54.4
07/09/19	86	59	145	59.3
08/09/19	92	61	153	60.1
Total	4910	4325	9235	53.2

For comparison, here are the all-time top 10 days for gaining new dedicated followers for Pelaajat. Rally English was part of four top 10 broadcasts, but most of their top-follower-gaining broadcasts were made in Finnish, and approximately half of these new followers have found other Finnish esports channels as well.

Day	New dedicated followers	New other followers	New followers (Total)	Share of dedicated (%)
12/03/21	1835	1411	3246	56.5
29/08/19	1200	1162	2362	50.8
01/02/20	1119	1597	2716	41.2
03/03/19	1077	600	1677	64.2
28/02/19	911	812	1723	52.9
30/08/19	888	747	1635	54.3
02/03/19	873	654	1527	57.2
05/09/19	744	681	1425	52.2
31/08/19	691	448	1139	60.7
23/02/19	615	792	1407	43.7

Certainly, some dedicated users won’t be following other Finnish esports channels in the future. If one follows a channel for PUBG content spoken in English, it’s not going to happen for any other channel than Elisa. However, a lot of potential followers can be found from dedicated users who have followed because of “traditional” Finnish CSGO broadcasts.

Plenty of space for follows

Twitch users can follow a maximum of 2000 channels with their accounts. If we take a look at how many channels these dedicated users are currently following, we’ll find that there is a lot of room left. Half of them follow less than 40 Twitch channels. Not following any other than one of four Finnish esports channels is not about the limits of Twitch, it’s about something else.

When we widen our sights to all 117049 users following 1-4 Finnish Esports channels, the median mark is at 46 followed channels. In other words, half of the users (50.1 % and 58688 users to be precise) follow 46 channels or less, while the other half is following 47 to 2000 channels. More than one third (39286 users, 34 %) of all users follow less than 25 channels.

The average number of followed channels is 87.3, but that is heavily influenced by users following more than 1000 channels. There are only 386 users (0.3 %) with that amount of followed channels. One could (and probably should) question if these are legitimate users at all, but with this sample size, their impact is irrelevant.

Fun fact: Six users have somehow managed to break the barrier of 2000 followed channels by getting to 2001, 2002 or even 2003.

The “following amount numbers” could be a study of its own. I’m part of this group of 117000 Twitch users and I’m currently following 231 channels on Twitch. It sounds like a big number after studying these numbers, but somehow it’s still possible that the only live channel on my Twitch is a rerun of some random ESL tournament.

Conclusions

This was the first blog post about Twitch API data of Finnish esports broadcasters and I hope you learned something new. In the next part, I’ll dig deeper into the follower data of these four channels.

If you somehow managed to skip all the content and stop right here, I’ll try to summarize the key points and findings of this first part:

• Twitch is one of the most popular platforms for live streaming, especially for esports tournaments.
• Esports is a growing industry that needs to figure out its monetization.
• Esports broadcasters need good follower numbers on Twitch to even have a chance to succeed financially.
• These four studied Twitch channels (ElisaViihdeSport, Pelaajatcom, TES_csgo and yleeurheilu) have about 117000 unique followers in total
  • Almost two thirds of these Twitch users follow only one of these four channels that were studied
    • They are (usually) potential followers for other channels.
    • Most of them follow either Elisa or Pelaajat.
  • Half of these users follow 1-46 channels on Twitch, so it’s not about the limits of Twitch, which is 2000 followed channels per Twitch user.

The second part will be published after the summer holidays. If you have any questions about anything in this post, you can drop me a DM on Twitter or LinkedIn!

(Cover photo: Unsplashed)