LoL community casters take over as LEC gains viewership

The LEC season has concluded with some great news on the ratings front, with statistics showing an improvement in key metrics compared to last year, thanks solely to a strong increase in League of Legends Fans tuning in to co-streamers at the expense of the official broadcast.

Streaming statistics site Esports Charts revealed in a report this week that Competition Co-streamers like Caedrel and Ibai have become a major force on LEC matchday, with thousands tuning in to watch the action. This surge has resulted in an increase of around 13 percent in total hours watched and higher concurrent averages across the split. However, as a result, the number of concurrent streams on official broadcasts has dropped, with the LEC Twitch channel taking the biggest hit.

Esports Charts reports that peak audiences for the official stream are down by more than 50 percent, despite only a slight dip in numbers compared to last year. More than 650,000 fans tuned in to watch G2 complete a gentlemen’s sweep of Fnatic in the LEC Championship around this time last year; this year’s final featured the same teams (as grand finals in Europe tend to do) and recorded just 606,193, but with many more viewers watching via co-streamers rather than the main channel.

This follows a trend that picked up earlier this year, with records at the time showing that Caedrel and Ibai combined to capture 48.9 percent of the audience during the 2024 Winter Split finals between G2 and MAD Lions KOI, which also happened to be the LEC’s most-watched match of the year. Also seeing success in the early splits of the year was Karmine Corp, which saw French viewership soar thanks to Kamet0, who filled the same gap that Ibai has for his team MAD Lions KOI and the Spanish Competition community.

Some Competition Fans believe that without co-streaming, the LEC would be in much bigger trouble, especially after Riot’s January layoffs hit its broadcast team in Germany hard. Without an increase in content from official sources, many believe that mainstream would lose value.

It will be interesting to see if this trend continues into the new year, and not just in Europe. The shake-up in the LCS ecosystem will also mean new opportunities for star players. Competition co-streamers to join the revamped conference system once it finally arrives.