URL's "Rookies vs. Vets" is coming on March 28, and it has dominated the battle rap conversation for the last several weeks. The debate is based largely around whether the rookies can transition to the bigger stage and the subjective arguments over who in each match-up is better.
BattleRap.com has instead decided to take a more objective route (again), diving into the stats to see what we can learn about the card.
As always, the graphs are made by Hjörtur Jónasson for BattleRap.com using numbers based on work done by the good people at VerseTracker. There are some discrepancies between some of their battle counts and ours, but that's on purpose as we left out the more unofficial videos (e.g. Charlie Clips vs. Goodz, or DNA vs. Michael Blackson). If you have any questions, or notice any errors in the graphs below, let us know in the comments and we'll sort it out.
NOTE: These charts work better on computers than mobile devices.
How To Use The Chart
Basically: the bigger the bubble, the higher the number.
The first chart shows the rookies' battles and views. Put your cursor over the grey part of any bubble to focus on a battler, then move to the smaller orange bubbles to see each of his opponents and how many views the match-up got on YouTube (as of March 2015).
We've labeled the opponent in the bigger bubbles, and as the bubbles got smaller we've tried to include some shorthand versions of their names as well. Click on any of the bubbles to view the battle.
Now here's the rookies on the left (same graph as above), compared to the veterans on the right. Again, put your cursor on any bubble to see the full match-up and the views it got.
What Does It All Mean?
Clearly the vets have at least two advantages over the rookies: experience and popularity.
Combined, the veterans have about three times the number of battles and 10 times the number of views.
The most seasoned battler shown above is Real Deal with more than 60 performances, although he's also the least viewed vet on the card. That's partly because he started in the low-view freestyle era and also because he has fewer performances on URL than the rest of the battlers on the card, and URL battles mean big views. He's the only vet without a million-view battle, with the closest being his URL appearance against B Magic in 2012, which recently cracked 500,000.
Charlie Clips has the most battles that have passed one million views, 10 of out of his 26 total. But he's still about seven million views behind DNA, who is the most viewed emcee on the card, thanks to his 52 battles and near-constant grind across URL, Don't Flop and King Of The Dot. The biggest factor is his 2011 match-up with Dizaster, which has passed three million views and is considered by many as one of the best battles ever.
The rookie with the most battles is Sno, with 23. That gives him four more than veteran K-Shine, although Shine's most-viewed battle — a classic with Tsu Surf from the first "Summer Madness" — is nearing two million views. That's more than all of Sno's catalogue combined.
T-Top is the most popular rookie. He's amassed more than 2.5 million views in only 17 battles and he's the opponent in four other rookies' most-viewed battles (Sno, Th3 Saga, Brizz Rawsteen and Chess).
Also of note, Prep and Th3 Saga's one-off battle has done big numbers after getting strong reviews, netting more than 225,000 views in just under three weeks.
Combined, the rookies have been in 84 battles. That's an average of about 12 each. But, keep in mind that most of them have battled each other already, and that 84 battles combined ends up being a lot fewer. Likewise with the vets, but it skews the average less because their combined number is larger.
The event goes down on Saturday, March 28 at the Gramercy Theatre at 127 E 23rd Street in New York. Doors are scheduled to open at 1:00 p.m.
Tickets are available here.
What other findings can you pull out of the data? Let us know in the comments below.
{{ comment.author.name }}
{{ reply.author.name }}