ESL Pro League viewership has dropped dramatically since streaming on Facebook

So another CS:GO ESL Pro League season has ended, but the viewership has dropped significantly compared to the finale events of the previous season.

ESL Pro League Season 7 Finals is the first ESL LAN event to be streamed on the Facebook platform. Viewership is scattered between the official English stream on Facebook and many other Twitch streams in Russian, Portuguese, and Spanish. Overall, viewership hit a record low.

Season 7 Finals has the lowest number of followers in the past three seasons, according to Esports Charts. English streams on Facebook peaked at 24,000, while past English streams easily surpassed 218,000 (Season 4), 113,000 (Season 5), and 80,000 (Season 6). Season 4 was the last Pro League Finals to be streamed in English on Twitch, since then, Seasons 5 and 6 have been streamed exclusively on YouTube.

In terms of the highest number of concurrent viewers, Season 7 could only reach 122,000, a big difference compared to Season 4 (317,000), Season 5 (364,000) and Season 6 (625,000). This shows that the Russian Twitch channel has a higher viewership than the English Facebook stream: the number of followers on the Russian channel peaked at 84,000 compared to 23,000 on the Facebook stream. On average, English Facebook only reaches 10,000 viewers, while the Russian Twitch stream channel always doubles that number.

Let’s briefly look at the relationship between the ESL numbers shifting focus away from Twitch and the viewership at the tournament’s CS:GO events. The majority indicated that fans would rather watch the event on Twitch in Russian – assuming this is a language the vast majority of viewers don’t speak – instead of watching the English stream on Facebook.

Contrary to what ESL said in the Facebook deal, the social network is unlikely to achieve the ideal average viewership. Many controversial posts have broken out on the Reddit forum at /r/GlobalOffensive complaining about the number of followers, the quality of the stream, and the request to be able to embed the English stream channel outside of Facebook. Some even scoffed and said they would not buy sponsored products. The best way for the next viewer to follow the English stream on Facebook is to watch it on HLTV with the link embedded in this website.

Source: Dotesports