More than one million people watched KSI and Logan Paul’s pay-per-view fight through illegal streams on Twitch instead of paying $10 to watch the official stream on YouTube.
At its peak, more than 860,000 people paid $10 to watch Logan Paul and KSI’s months-in-the-making fight, but that was nothing.
A number of illegal streams on Twitch gathered more than 1.2 million viewers. These were people interested in watching the YouTubers pummel each other, but didn’t want to spend $10 to do so. In the realm of streaming and YouTube, a few hundred thousand people may not seem like a big deal, but at $10 a person, that works out to $4 million.
It’s a huge loss — not just for KSI, but for YouTube. The company is taking an unannounced percentage of the proceeds as a hosting fee. Even lowballing an estimate of 30 percent, which is just under the company’s normal 40 percent cut it takes from creators’ AdSense revenue on videos, that’s approximately $1.2 million in losses.
There are now officially more people watching the Logan Paul/KSI fight on Twitch through illegal streams than through the official YouTube stream. pic.twitter.com/LAfIFnxGkP
Jason Kint, the CEO of Digital Content Next and an expert in the field, tweeted about the noticeable division in viewers between those easily finding streams indirectly promoted on Twitch’s front page as “boxing” content.
“Nothing makes sense any more,” Kint tweeted . “I’m ticked off at Amazon [which owns Twitch] for not protecting the live PPV [Pay-Per-View] IP of Google’s YouTube from piracy. Welcome to our world, YouTube. Millions in immediately lost value and more importantly undermines future business opportunities as it trains piracy is only a click away. Amazon fail.”
Kint previously said that if KSI and Logan Paul streamed the fight for free, their viewership would have doubled. Instead of humming along steadily at 750,000 concurrents, which it averaged at toward the end of the night, Paul and KSI’s fight could have run with 1.5 or even two million viewers.
While it may be hard to generate pity or sympathy for two mutually controversial YouTube creators, this does say something about the future of livestreaming major events. Marketing these types of events, and taking time away from daily uploads or focusing on other videos to do so, does harm to a creator’s business. Liam Chivers, KSI’s promoter, told Bloomberg something similar just ahead of the match.
“I can guarantee if Logan and J. [KSI] had not done this boxing,” Chivers said, “they would’ve earned more money.”
Also, Twitch! Twitch didn’t even have to host the fight, and 1.2 million people watched — including sitting through ads — to see the fight. Well done, Twitch! You win!
Although organizers told Polygon prior to the fight that everyone would break even at a couple of hundred thousand viewers, the goal was to bring in millions. Technically, the fight did — they just weren’t on YouTube.
This isn’t a new problem for Twitch. When Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor met for their highly anticipated pay-per-view boxing match last year, more than 239 illegal streams were watched by approximately 2,930,598 people on a variety of services, according to The Independent. This includes Twitch.
Streaming these types of fights breaks Twitch’s community guidelines. The company’s guidelines state:
Uploading any content that you do not own, do not have the rights to, or are otherwise not authorized to use, violates our Terms of Service and may make your account liable to DMCA takedowns by third-party rights holders. We do not tolerate, for example: rebroadcasting other Twitch broadcasters’ content, playing pirated games, showing third-party movies and television shows, rebroadcasting a sports match, playing on unauthorized private servers, or uploading content from other sites without permission of the copyright owner.
But there were no DMCA takedowns. Every stream that ran, often with less-than-subtle titles, remained active the entire fight. Even when it was promoted on the front page and impossible to ignore. Although Twitch does rely on flaggers, administrators and moderators to work in concert to ensure inappropriate content is flagged, there are certain events that feel impossible to ignore.
Like KSI and Logan Paul fighting, or Mayweather and McGregor’s match.
What happens when KSI and Logan Paul meet again next year, as is already rumored? Forget them. Any other YouTuber who wants to run a livestream to try and pay for a high-caliber event has to worry about more people finding an illegal stream and choosing that instead; but whereas it can be difficult to find someone livestreaming the Oscars through Google, all people have to do is open up Twitch’s main page and wait for someone to offer them exactly what they’re looking for.
There are questions regarding whether KSI and Paul’s organizers contacted Twitch to run DMCA markers to try and prevent pirating ahead of the fight. It’s also unclear if Twitch was aware of the streams while they were happening. Polygon has reached out to both the event’s organizers and Twitch for comment.
