LTA North kicks off with viewership decline, LTA South sees slight audience growth

The opening weekends of League of Legends’ LTA North and LTA South Split 1 have shown opposite audience trends.

The LTA North has recorded fewer viewers than the 2024 LCS Spring Split, with the LTA South garnering slightly more peak viewers than its 2024 CBLOL Split 1 opening week.

The first days of Riot Games’ new cross-conference league peaked at 148,603 viewers in the Northern Conference and 254,464 for its Southern counterpart, according to esports data platform Esports Charts.

The League of Legends Championship of the Americas (LTA) was announced last year as part of Riot’s restructuring of the competitive LoL ecosystem in the Americas. The new format is divided into two conferences, with the LTA North featuring some LCS teams and the LTA South representing the former CBLOL.

The ecosystem changes also saw a reduction in the number of teams competing as each conference offers seven slots with the addition of a guest slot. The two regions kicked off on January 25^th and will continue until February 9^th, with BO3 matches throughout the double-elimination brackets.

So far, only the Southern conference has been able to keep up with viewership trends compared to the beginning of the region’s League of Legends esports season last year.

The most popular matches of the past weekend were FlyQuest versus Shopify Rebellion (SR) in the LTA North and LOUD against paiN Gaming in the LTA South.

The latter two organisations dominantly led in terms of hours watched within the conference, with LOUD and paiN’s match generating 829,200 watch hours. However, this is not the case for FlyQuest and Shopify Rebellion.

With 202,400 watch hours, Cloud9 versus LYON lead the chart within the LTA North. FlyQuest and Shopfiy Rebellion generated 179,400 watch hours.

LTA North also saw interesting audience statistics regarding the most popular streaming platforms and broadcast languages.

Although Twitch (104,523 peak viewers) and English-language broadcasts (105,854) lead both categories, those tuning in on YouTube (43,323) and watching Portuguese-language broadcasts (41,044) accounted for a decent percentage of the audience.

In the LTA South, Portuguese-language broadcasts (241,678 peak viewers) attracted the vast majority of the region’s viewership. Meanwhile, YouTube (144,567) and Twitch (117,097) were equally popular.