Hence the excitement. Can’t wait to see what their contribution is.
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On the same note. Teenage Engineering releasing a Rick and Morty Pocket Operator.
https://www.instagram.com/p/ByAhpBuC4Qh/?igshid=1v2foaudzppyp
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I posted this already in the eSports thread. No one seemed to care or even read it. People’s minds are made up already. They like eSports so they’re ignoring this article even though it appears to be very well written and researched.
Preconceived opinions FTW!
It’s true. it’s just also true that the numbers on all advertising and viewership are faked. Everyone selling ads across all mediums is vastly inflating the numbers on views, clicks, etc. There’s no reason to pick on eSports inflated numbers as some sign of their doom or failure. As long as advertisers continue to believe these lies, as they have since the days of radio or even further back, then they will continue to prop up lots of things that have no viable business model otherwise.
If you had bothered to read the article, you would find out that it covers a lot more than just advertising numbers.
It does also indicate that, while the bubble may pop, it will likely recover to a sustainable level afterwards.
I’m actually not big on e-sports. In my original wow guild we had some arena season 1 “professional” players. I played with them all the time. They went to China and Europe as one of the original US teams. The promoters involved were pretty shady, and you’ve got young relatively exploitable quasi-celebrities (much less so then) that get taken advantage of. It’s a constantly repeating cycle. Something is in vogue, has tons of fans, people nerd out about it. Leeches that know how to get blood out of it show up and start extracting. Bleed the thing out, and fall off to come back for a new fresh target later.
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I read it, but what matters besides advertising and viewership numbers? All the world’s largest sports organizations get the vast majority of their revenue from advertising and sponsorships. Sometimes it’s direct, like brands on soccer jerseys, but usually it’s indirect via TV deals. The TV network gets the ad money, and gives a large portion of it to the league for the broadcasting rights. Ticket sales and merch sales are a drop in the bucket.
eSports has fake numbers, but they are much closer to real than the numbers from Nielsen on television. I would worry more about the current pro non-e sports bubble bursting due to the death of television.
With all the TV money combined, each NFL team gets $255 million per year. At the rate of cord cutting, at some point even Nielsen won’t be able to maintain the lie that people are still watching television.
eSports has as much, if not more, worldwide viewership than any other sport. If that’s not enough viewers to be sustainable, then sports as entertainment are not sustainable. They may not be operating profitably now, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be if they just start spending more appropriately.
The only reason that other sports are “legitimate” is because rich old white guys put their money into it. I’ve long since been done letting them distort my perception of how popular things really are. I learned that lesson back when I realized way way more people in the US were reading manga than were reading Batman. SDCC is all over the news each year, but Otakon was a local Baltimore story at best. And eSports is bigger than A LOT of major professional sports.
If 256 minor league baseball teams that each have laughably small fanbases, are sustainable, then eSports teams with worldwide viewership are going to be more than just fine.
How do you put this into practice? Generally I judge how popular things are the using more or less the same heuristic everyone else does. How much are people in my little bubble and ya know in the modern equivalent to the public forum talking about it?
I look at numbers on things.
Otakon at its peak had 34K unique memberships in 2013, now it’s around 28k. At its peak in 2014, NYCC claims to have over 180,000 attendance since 2016. That number is a turnstile figure, so it has to be at least divided by 4. so probably realistically around 50k people. Obviously the proportion of media coverage and attention given to NYCC are way way way more than 1.5x due to the presence of Hollywood celebrities.
The New York Times kept the manga best-sellers on a separate list from the graphic novel best-sellers. Why? Because otherwise, the graphic novel best-sellers list would have just been all manga. They ended up stop doing the list entirely.
Tiger Woods just won the Masters. It had about 10 million viewers for golf on a Sunday morning.
Even if you consider that the viewership was inflated the Dota2 International had 4 million viewers on average at any given time.
Prize pool for the International, a large portion of which, comes from viewers directly giving money and buying cosmetic stuff was $25+ million. Prize pool for the Masters was about $11 million. One of these events is historic epic world news all over the media because old rich white guys care about it. The other event is something only nerds even know exist.
Nerds are large in number. Larger in number than anyone realizes. We are many.
Old white guys are actually smaller in number, but due to having all the money and controlling the media, they force everyone else to know about their shit. They make their stuff seem bigger and more important than other things, regardless of actual popularity.
They also use their money to create a culture where their shit is “legitimate” and other people’s shit is not, again, regardless of the actual numbers of people who care about the things.
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So reading between the lines a bit then. It seems the solution to knowing how popular things actually are, seems to be just googling “Thing X’s viewership numbers” for everything and just comparing, and crucially, not caring how much people are talking about any individual thing.
This is the second time you’ve asserted this. Neither time have you backed up this statement with a citation or source. I’m not saying you’re wrong, but where’s your proof?
Given the amount of people who are cutting their cords and ditching cable, if anything, the Nielsen numbers are under counting people who watch sports, not over counting. At the same time, according to that eSports article, in just one example, the number of viewers of some event was inflated by nearly 100 MILLION viewers, doubling the amount of people who viewed the event.
Where is your proof that eSports viewership is more accurate than Nielsen ratings?
Mostly, just realize that the degree the mainstream media reports on a thing has no relation to how many people care about a thing, or how legitimate that thing is. Check actual numbers, understand how those numbers are calculated, how fake or real they are, etc.
The other part is to have a world mindset. If you believe in national borders your view of what matters is still greatly distorted. The NFL seems like the biggest deal in the US, but it’s actually not. Meanwhile look at a story like Stephon Marbury. In the US, it’s just a cute story. Stephon goes to China and becomes a big star in the Chinese basketball league. Uh, but China is a country of 1.4-1.5 billion people. Stephon Marbury is a LEGEND. In terms of worldwide historical importance and overall popularity he completely eclipses a lot of NBA players who are definitely much better at basketball than he is.
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When he was playing in the NBA and shortly after, he had become something of a punching bag. $15 shoes? Playing on the same team with Stevie Franchise?
I didn’t know until years after the real story of the shoes. Dude really wanted to help poor people. Surprise surprise, the mega-corporations weren’t interested.
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You’re right that I don’t have a proof. But if I were to argue that Nielsen numbers are more accurate, there is also no proof of that either. Since most of the organizations which collect this data are extremely secretive, there’s almost no way to know without industrial espionage.
What we do know are their basic methods of data collection. Nielsen still operates by sampling a subset of tv viewing households. It also assumes that the data on how many total TV viewing households in total is accurate. In principle this should work as long as the sample is statistically significant, just like in scientific trials. In reality, it’s way off the mark. Just look how many TV shows have been cancelled despite being obviously vastly popular.
Other statistics like Twitch viewership are definitely fraudulent due to bots, that’s the only way in which they are fake. One viewer = one viewer. Not a sample, an actual fucking count of everyone on every screen who is streaming. We know exactly how long each stream was streamed for. We know who streamed it. We know a fuckton.
Consider the data from a small 1000 viewer twitch stream. Yeah, there’ might be viewbots. But there’s no sampling going on here. There is data on every single viewer. When they started and stopped watching. When they chatted. When they left and came back. What game was being played during the exact seconds they watched. What device they were using to watch. Was it playing in the background or the foreground. Their IP address and other info from their browser. Plus, to a certain extent, the bots can be removed from the data with spam filtering techniques. And more and more and more evil privacy invading tracking biz for every single individual viewer at all times. Mouse location on the screen at all times. It’s insanity.
There is no way according to just sheer common sense that, even with viewbotting fraud, the Nielsen method of collecting data on TV viewers is anywhere nearly as accurate as the viewcounts on YouTube, Twitch, or any other thing on the web.
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So stop making the statement that Esports viewership numbers are much closer to being real than the numbers from Nielsen.
As the article explains in pretty good detail. This is not true. You can distort the numbers without using bots. The article points out multiple instances where the streams were placed on other websites, and just having that website open counted as someone “viewing” the event.
"Last month, Magic: The Gathering put on its biggest esports event yet to debut its brand new pro league: a $1 million tournament at Boston’s PAX East convention. At first, viewership on Twitch hovered at around 20,000—a pretty typical amount of viewers for a pro Magic tournament on a weekday. Suddenly, in the afternoon, something miraculous happened: viewership quadrupled to a remarkable 88,000…
The tournament’s stream could have been embedded in hundreds of websites across the internet affiliated with the company Curse, a network of websites that also sells ad tools, data from Dhruv Mehrotra, a technologist at Kotaku ’s parent company, G/O Media, indicates. Curse’s websites, including the gaming wiki Gamepedia, receive one billion views a month, according to internet software company CloudFlare. Users scrolling through a wiki about video game weapons or browsing a gaming forum might suddenly be confronted with an embed of the livestream, which would play when they view it, even briefly.
Once Curse turned on the embedded stream service for Magic: The Gathering ’s recent tournament, viewership skyrocketed, according to data reviewed by Kotaku and Mehrotra, resulting in what the game publisher described as “the biggest Magic event ever—it’s not even close. There were over 8.1 million views of Magic content on Twitch over the weekend and we hit a peak of 157,000 people tuning in on Finals day.” It’s questionable whether tens of thousands of those views truly represent engaged humans watching the stream. Publisher Wizards of the Coast did not respond to Kotaku ’s request for comment."
“Last year, Kotaku reported on what looked like a furtive view inflation method born of Curse’s ad tech. We found that some of these embedded livestreams lived on the very bottom of long, encyclopedic wiki entries on the website Gamepedia, where they were not immediately visible. One theory is that this contributed to hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of views that looked illegitimate, or, generously, questionable. Embedded livestreams on Gamepedia seemed to have disproportionately inactive chats, indicating that the viewers weren’t as engaged as viewers intentionally seeking the livestream might be. It looked like a lot of those viewers may not have known they were looking at the stream.”
Additionally, at least Nielsen is a third party who comes up with the viewership numbers. As the article points out, the people putting out the eSports numbers are biased:
“In our industry, the reporting numbers generally come from publishers themselves or from teams or organizations who are self-interested. Those incentives may cause issues.” Last year, he said, one analytics organization was reporting that the Houston Rockets’ mid-season invitational viewership numbers were 126 million at their peak, which was 6.5 times higher than what they actually were. “We had to immediately go out there and refute that. That’s 6.5 times higher than what we actually saw. The number we saw at peak. We were proud of it. We went up 22 percent every year.”
The article lists example after example how eSports viewership is probably inflated by other means other than bots.
Just having a single television on in a Nielsen home counts as perhaps many thousands of views, even if nobody is home and the TV just go left on. Having a TV on in a bar or restaurant with Nielsen tracking counts as many views, even if no customers arrive.
Any of those other ways in which views are inflated also apply to Nielsen TV/Radio views, in equal, or perhaps greater numbers.
At least in the case of streams being embedded, well, someone was watching it. They could click away. They could pause the video, or stop it, or mute it. There was a human being on a web site. The stream was there on that page. I’d argue that’s more engagement than someone having a TV on in a house while they probably are playing a game on their phone.
There are an estimated 118.4 million households that have a Nielsen box. Compare that to the Gamepedia website that has one billion views a month. That’s an order of magnitude of difference.
Additionally, to be counted, a program has to be on a Nielsen box for six minutes, as opposed to just having a website open counts as a “view” online.
As I just wrote, and as the article points out, this isn’t true. “some of these embedded livestreams lived on the very bottom of long, encyclopedic wiki entries on the website Gamepedia, where they were not immediately visible.”
People could have been “watching” these streams without even realizing it.
If you’re going to argue with me, at least do me the courtesy of reading what I write so I don’t have to repeat myself.