What is Twitch? Everything you need to know about Twitch

What is Twitch?

Opened for a public beta on 6th June 2011. Twitch is an online streaming platform that attracts on average 35 million visitors per month. Twitch was originally part of Justin.TV, a website launched as an online streaming platform with many different content categories. Gaming proved to be the most popular type of content on Justin.tv. Because of this, the owners decided to split the gaming part of the site and create a brand new service called Twitch.

Twitch’s Exponential Growth

Due to the huge popularity Twitch had gained, it’s parent company Justin.TV closed down so that they could focus solely on Twitch. Amazon came calling and on 25th August 2015, Amazon acquired the streaming platform for US$970 million. By 2015, it had acquired more than 1.5 million broadcasters and 100 million viewers each month. Four years later, Twitch remains the largest site for streamed gaming content in the world.

The numbers are huge. For example at any one time Twitch has around 1,000,000 concurrent users! Weekends seems to be a lot more popular than weekdays. For instance there are 20% more viewers on a weekend, this is great news for content creators as there around 15% more streams, giving a 5% net increase in the potential audience.

Year to Date Figures 2019

Date	Avg. concur. viewers	Avg. concur. channel	Time watched	Streamers
Aug	1,301,002	48,205	688M hrs	n/a
Jul	1,232,340	48,045	917M hrs	3376932
Jun	1,304,579	47,898	939M hrs	3459884
May	1,262,560	48,294	939M hrs	3643312
Apr	1,234,112	51,261	889M hrs	3976738
Mar	1,273,772	54,934	947M hrs	4463290
Feb	1,311,802	56,286	880M hrs	4449155
Jan	1,276,009	55,794	949M hrs	4631348

Streamed Content

Hopefully you have a good understanding and you’ve had your question ‘What is Twitch?‘ answered. Next, we’ll take a look at the most popular games and streamers on the platform.

Fortnite:
Fortnite is one of those games that has just blew-up thanks to in part to Twitch. A battle royale style game, it’s Free to Play which is one of the reasons for it’s huge following. The graph below shows the number of registered Fortnite players worldwide from August 2017 to March 2019 (in millions).  There are over 250 million users playing Fortnite. Now not all of these stream their games but from the numbers you can see

Here’s a list of the biggest ever Twitch Donations.

Overwatch:
Not as popular as it once was. Overwatch, a first person team based shooter used to feature all over the front page of Twitch. I don’t tend to see if much on the front page these days but it does appear in the recommended channels section so all is not lost. In the past the Overwatch forums have had comments about Overwatch loosing players.

Overwatch is still really popular but isn’t as prominent on the front page as it used to be.

Most Popular Streamers: Ninja who?

Chances are you are reading this article as you have limited exposure to streaming in general. It probably means you haven’t heard about some of the most popular streamers.

One of the most popular streamers in the world is Ninja. As of July 2019, he has the most followers on Twitch.tv. Having over fourteen million followers and an average of over 50,000 viewers per week means that he is  a powerhouse in the world of streaming.

Ninja moved to a Twitch competitor in August 2019. Mixer is another streaming platform, it has been said the deal was worth a hell of a lot of money.

Another really popular Twitch Streamer is Syndicate. You can find out Who Syndicate is and more here.