Twitch offers a wide array of info via their view count system, including live viewer counts for all streamers who are broadcasting. We wll look at League of Legends streamer stats for December. These are gathered via Twitch's API on a minute-by-minute basis.
Overall Stats for League of Legends on Twitch
During December 2014, Twitch had 145,157 different broadcasters stream League of Legends for at least 1 minute during the month. Only Twitch knows how many unique viewers watched, but I can tell you they watched a lot. To be precise, 4,131,338,685 minutes of streams. That's 4.1 billion minutes on League alone. That works out to:
68,855,644 viewer hours
2,868,985 viewer days
7,860 viewer years
For comparison's sake, that is 125% more than Hearthstone, which we looked at yesterday. Like Hearthstone, there are huge differences between the viewership of the top streams and the majority of streams, although LoL isn't quite as extreme. The mean League stream had 75.2 viewers, but the median viewer count and the mode were both 1. To compare it to income inequality, Hearthstone would be Namibia while League of Legends would be Bolivia. Sure, it's not good, but at least it's not the most extreme.
E-sports: As Big as Sports
Or close to it. It's hard to wrap one's mind around 68.9 million viewer hours, but let's compare it to some of the televised championship games.
2010 World Cup: 910 million viewers watching for 2 hours = 1.82 billion viewer hours
2014 Super Bowl: 111.5 million viewers watching for 4 hours = 446 million viewer hours
2014 NBA Finals: 15.5 million viewers watching 5 games for 3 hours = 232.5 million viewer hours
2014 Stanley Cup Finals: 4.7 million viewers watching 5 games for 3 hours = 70.5 million viewer hours
Roughly speaking, LoL on Twitch saw as much screen time in December (a month with less competitive play than normal) as ice hockey did during it's biggest event of the year (Olympics excluded) featuring the two largest TV markets in North America (New York and Los Angeles). Even if those numbers don't include Canada, the on-peak/off-peak comparison looks very favorable for League compared to North America's long-time 4th major sport.
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