Live Feed Numbers from Western Regionals
Here’s some metrics provided by ustream of our live feed during Western Regionals. Unfortunately some of the Sunday numbers appear lost.
Of note:
21,000 unique viewers on Saturday
270 average throughout the 8-bout day.
Additional background: Very few people knew I was going to try to feed the live web cam ahead of time. I only confirmed it was legal, without even asking anyone if I could do it. The video was an average quality web cam (which is to say, low quality video) – though the audio was reasonably good. It was more like live radio with some vague images accompanying them. A huge value add was the fact that there was a chat room that was attached to the video. It gave those watching a sense of community and those who were more knowledgeable could answer others’ questions.
Friday morning I sent out an email to one local and one national email list providing the link for the web cast. That was the first time it was publicly known it would be available. I’m sure that the email from the national group got passed around; I have heard directly from a few of the watchers that they heard about it on their local email lists. I heard the same story 10-fold indirectly from others. I believe DNN (who I had not yet met) got a whiff of it and publicized it as well.
I didn’t write down any numbers on Friday, but it went from dozens in the morning to maybe 200 at peak. On the following days I did write down the numbers anytime I checked on the video camera (it sat alone by itself most of the time). These numbers represent how many people were watching it at any given time. Games 9-16 were on Saturday, Games 17-20 on Sunday. Multiple numbers represent different times in the game when I checked on the video, usually half time and game end. I rounded down to the nearest 10s value.
Game 9 – 60 / 120
Game 10 – 210 / 200
Game 11 – 260
Game 12 – 360
Game 13 – 430 / 630 / 1000 / 900 / 160
Game 14 – 190
Game 15 – 240
Game 16 – 300
Game 17 – 50
Game 18 – 65 / 75
Dude Derby – 175
Game 19 – 200
Game 20 – 100 / 130 / 430 / 550 / 650
Viewers were watching from all over the US and some in Canada and the UK.
