The rise of Twitch

Read about these games and gamers that had an awesome 2020 by CECI ALVAREZ

THE GROWTH

As far as the overall traffic and concurrent viewers on Twitch are concerned, the platform has seen a consistent rise over the years. Twitch began as a spinoff to the general-streaming platform Justin. tv back in 2011. Since the beginning, Twitch, as a platform, was focused on video-game streaming, although of late, various different types of streamers have emerged.

Twitch has experienced tremendous growth in terms of viewers over the past few years. At the beginning of 2018, the platform had around 1.08 million average concurrent viewers. That figure has now surpassed the 2 million mark, with around 2.08 million concurrent average viewers currently in 2020.

GROWTH OF JUST CHATTING

One of the fuels of Twitch’s growth since May has been the steady rise of the “Just Chatting” category, which includes video logs, open conversations, and other unscripted interactions between a streamer and their audience. In December 2019, Just Chatting was already the No. 1 category on Twitch by a slim margin, accounting for roughly 80 million hours watched. This past November, Twitch streamers spent 228 million hours in the same category.

That’s not just a nearly 300% increase in the audience in eleven months. That also makes it bigger than the next three top categories — livestreamed gameplay of League of Legends, Among Us, and Fortnite — put together. That’s an easy statistic to write off as a knock-on consequence from lockdown boredom, but that’s also the kind of overall audience momentum that’s not going to go away when COVID does.