Honestly guys, you think the numbers are high? They are actually modest when you consider how massive the Twitter platform is and how broad its reach is.
First of all, a decent portion of the total unique viewership is actually coming from twitch. When you see a concurrent viewership of say 30k, it's easy to forget that thousands of viewers are rotating in and out of the stream. So an hour at 30k concurrent could easily mean over 100k unique viewers. Over the course of a 3 day tournament, you'd easily have millions.
Twitter would see the same phenomenon - people rotating in and out of the stream. But if autoplay was counted, concurrent viewership would have been MUCH higher, since people wouldn't rotate out unless they manually closed the ad window or navigate away from their timeline. The fact that Twitter only added about 70k concurrent during the finals tells me that people had to open the window to count.
The large gap between peak and concurrent suggests that over the weekend, a TON of people clicked the ad out of curiosity, and then closed it.
Think about it, that tweet bashing the venue was seen like 1.4 million times, and it wasn't promoted by twitter. Is it really that farfetched that ~10 million people would have clicked on this ad, with it popping up on just about everyone's page?
Obviously this is great news for Twitter streaming. It can quickly broaden ones reach far being beyond what twitch can do. But maintaining a Twitter users interest is going to be much more difficult since the population is less likely to be within the interested niche.
Considering all that, i dont think these numbers are all that impressive to the point id question the veracity.
Im more concerned that we got a esl press release about the numbers and not one about the inadequacy of the in-person experience. They'll talk to their shareholders, but not the people buying their product.
