Accepting my claim I've been watching for 1 year, when I got into it was slightly more popular than it is now, and during the middle of that time it did hit a v

Accepting my claim I've been watching for 1 year, when I got into it was slightly more popular than it is now, and during the middle of that time it did hit a very high peak [0]. >Given the absolute minimal user flow needed to watch a livestream That's the whole point: it was previously 100% effortless. If livestreams were on, they were on Twitch. You would go to twitch.tv, click the icon for CSGO which was 100% guaranteed to be on the front page, and the top streams were talented/personable professional players and/or tournaments with significant prize pools. After the deal ESL signed to start streaming CSGO on YouTube, the friction to finding a stream drastically increased (because it had previously been a URL navigation and two clicks until you were watching a stream). Then, YouTube's awful discoverability and UI/UX compounded the problem of finding streams on the new, secondary source, but that's assuming you actually knew the streams moved to YouTube and didn't just start going to Twitch and finding drastically less content, and gradually stop watching. Now, I'm not going to pretend my words are gospel or anything, but it's of serious consideration that the aforementioned peak popularity occurred in mid-January, very close to when ESL started streaming on YouTube exclusively (Feb 7 being the actual date [1]). Of course, there was a major tournament during this time as well, but this was a great tournament that you wouldn't expect to drive population numbers down so drastically as they fell off afterwards. For context: ESL is a very large player in the CS:GO scene, hosting plenty of tournaments, the most popular online league, and even Major tournaments (of which there are only a few a year with increased prize pools, the highest level of competition, additional other revenue for teams, and, less quantifiably, prestige for winning). [0]: http://steamcharts.com/app/730#1y http://steamcharts.com/app/730#1y [1]: http://en.pro.eslgaming.com/csgo/proleague/news/csgo-pro-league-and-youtube-partner-for-seasons-5-and-6/ http://en.pro.eslgaming.com/csgo/proleague/news/csgo-pro-lea...