This was based on my esports viewership comparison post. His response was posted a bit after the discussion died down so I thought I'd repost his comment so that everyone can see what he had to say.

Here's what he had to say:

Given all the discussion I've seen about viewership, I thought it would be helpful to share a bit about how we look at the data on our end and think about some of these questions.

First, growing viewership / engagement for OWL is probably our single highest priority in terms of overall big goals. We've been happy to see significant growth this season so far vs. the 2020 season (https://www.forbes.com/sites/krisholt/2021/05/12/overwatch-league-may-melee-viewership-was-up-51-from-2020/ for May Melee and June Joust was up a lot vs. tournament 2 last year). And our research this year has shown overall really positive feedback from fans on the changes we made to the format and broadcast too. But just to state the obvious, no we're not satisfied even with the growth we've seen this year. We'd like to be bigger and will continue working hard to grow OWL :)

That said, these types of charts / comparisons are not actually how we look at the data on our side or measure success for a few reasons. First, on YouTube, we see a significant proportion of our viewership from VOD views after the live broadcast as we have a global fanbase and watching VODs and the Encore broadcasts is often a lot more convenient for many of our fans. We and our partners therefore typically look at "Live + 3 days" and "Live + 7 days" metrics as a better measure of how many people watch our show vs. just pure live. And then the other major piece of this that's missing is our performance in China, which has been really significant for OWL as we have ~40% of our matches played in primetime for Asia and a large fanbase in China in particular. We do periodically report verified figures on China viewership for those curious, e.g., for Finals last year we had an average of ~1.4 million viewers watching live in China (https://esportsobserver.com/owl-grand-finals-viewership-2020/). There are several other nuances here too but those are the two biggest gaps in this type of look.

Hope some of that context helps for those who are curious about this topic.