"Mm, I suppose we can look forward to how it turns out after the Program Group edits it."
The Program Group had expected this from the start. The Second Evaluation stages were only meant to build anticipation. If not for Little Sakura and Chu Yuanqing each pulling off a superhuman performance, the idea of a decisive stage battle would never have come up this early.
Now that those two had left, the quality of the stages on Flash Dance had settled back to normal, and the Live Broadcast Room's split-channel design was finally serving its original purpose.
Namely—to keep the viewers around.
The design made sense. Two-thirds of the Second Evaluation livestream was bound to be dull. Who had the patience to watch 168 contestants perform candy 168 times?
Even if they had the Great Demon King, an A-Class contestant, perform it 168 times, the audience would still get bored.
They couldn't expect every single stage to feature an explosive performance on the level of Little Sakura or Chu Yuanqing, could they?
If that were the case, Flash Dance wouldn't be a talent show. It'd be a battle for the title of idol queen, packed with outstanding contestants.
So now, the number of viewers in the Live Broadcast Room's main channel was clearly continuing to fall.
And the longer time went on, the more the viewership slumped.
The reason was simple: the evaluations went from highest-rated contestants to lowest, not the other way around.
The contestants with the strongest skills and the greatest popularity had all finished their evaluations early on.
From here on, stage quality, contestant popularity, and viewer patience would all plummet in a series of steep steps, causing the number of people watching online to drop sharply.
The split-channel design was based on this framework. It used