The CDL 2021 season has officially kicked off with the Opening Weekend and plenty of people tuned in to check it out, as Activision has revealed that some staggering viewership records were broken during the weekend.
If you watched the CDL 2021 Opening Weekend via YouTube from February 11 to February 14 then you helped the league break some viewership records for the esport.
According to a press release from YouTube, the 2021 Opening Weekend was the most viewed CDL event outside of Champs Weekend. Specifically, the entire event garnered an average-minute-audience (AMA) of 80K, while 1.4 million hours of match content was watched.
The highlight of the weekend came from the match between Optic Chicago and Atlanta FaZe, which hit a record number of viewers for a regular-season game, garnering a peak viewership of 131,000.
It also seems like the partnership with YouTube to allow for in-game drops has paid off, as the company reported that over 209,000 CoD accounts were linked to YouTube “by the end of the Opening Weekend.” Similar to Twitch, this allows for players to earn in-game items and rewards simply by watching the stream.
Given the fact that this was just the Opening Weekend, the CDL 2021 season is just getting started. Week 2 of Stage 1 is set to run from Thursday, February 18 to Sunday, February 21, 2021.
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Watch now: Top 10 plays & moments from CDL Opening Weekend
Week 2 will feature some marquee matchups, including Toronto Ultra facing both OpTic Chicago and Atlanta FaZe, as well as New York Subliners rounding off the weekend against Minnesota ROKKR.
That said, however, it’s hard to imagine the second week topping the first in terms of viewership numbers since there was a lot of hype surrounding the start of the season, and not to mention there’s not FaZe vs OpTic this time around.