Twitch has been the largest streaming platform for many years now. Every month, millions of people flock to the service to watch their favorite streamers play games or just chat with their audience. Streamlabs, a leading live streaming service, recently released a report that shows just how dominant Twitch is compared to its biggest competitors.
Twitch, YouTube and Facebook Gaming: the numbers
There are several big players in the online streaming market. Facebook Gaming and YouTube have been trying to take over Twitch’s number one spot for years, but it doesn’t look like Twitch is going anywhere anytime soon. For the second quarter in a row, the Amazon-owned streaming platform has broken the record for most-watched hours in one quarter: 6.3 billion hours watched in Q1, compared to 5.4 billion hours watched in the previous quarter. That’s an increase of 16.5%.
Twitch represents over 72% of the live streaming market share in terms of viewership. In second place is YouTube Gaming Live, which attracts around 15.6% of the viewers. The third-biggest platform is Facebook Gaming with 12.1% of the viewers. Facebook has closed the viewership gap to YouTube Gaming significantly over the last year, but both platforms have a long way to go to reach the numbers of Twitch.
Here are some of the key numbers for Twitch from Streamlabs’ Q1 report:
- The “just chatting” category now accounts for 12% of all the traffic on Twitch.
- Viewers watched nearly one billion more hours of content on Twitch in Q1 compared to the previous quarter.
- Streamers broadcast 35 million more hours in Q1 compared to Q4.
- The number of unique channels reached an all-time high in Q1 (12.5 million unique channels).
- Average concurrent viewership increased more than 19% in Q1.
Most popular game categories on Twitch
One of the things that set Twitch apart from its competitors is the sheer number of channels and categories that is available on the platform. No matter the time of the day, users can visit the website or launch the app and scroll through thousands of live channels in a large variety of categories. Twitch is primarily a gaming streaming platform, but other categories such as just chatting have gained a lot of popularity over the last couple of years.
Another category that has become popular in recent years is the gambling category. The first gambling streams started to pop up around five years ago, and now there are thousands of them. In these streams, the audience watches gamblers play online slot machines, table games, and other types of gambling games with real money - often wagering thousands of dollars at a time.
When it comes to traditional gaming streams, the list of the most-watched games remains mostly unchanged. Games like League of Legends, Grand Theft Auto V, Fortnite and Call of Duty: Warzone are still among the most popular video games on the platform. But as previously mentioned, “just chatting” - a category in which the streamer casually interacts with their fans - has now become the biggest category on the service.
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