Report Highlights
- On average, 2,478,474 Twitch users are watching a stream at one time.
- Over 89,000 Twitch channels are streaming at a given time.
- About 7.8 million creators stream on Twitch in a month.
- The number of concurrent visitors peaked at 6,642,217 on June 25, 2022.
- Over half (56.1%) of all Twitch channels are in English.
- League of Legends gets the most stream views at about 190,000 per week.
- More Twitch channels use it to chat than to play any specific game.
- Viewers watched over 1.46 trillion minutes of Twitch streams in 2021.
- Twitch received about 20.5 million visitors per day in 2020.
- The number of creators streaming on Twitch has dropped by about 8% in 2022.
More statistics: Skype Users, Mastodon Statistics, Bereal Users
Twitch Users
Twitch has millions of users, including streamers, viewers, and people who do both, with about half of streamers also viewing other streams.
Consider some statistics about users, from how much they watch Twitch streams to changes in users over the years.
- Over 2.4 million people are viewing a stream on Twitch at a given moment.
- About 140 million people use Twitch at least once per month.
- Twitch received about 31 million visitors per day.
- Only 21.4% of monthly users visit Twitch daily.
- The number of concurrent viewers dropped by about 300,000 from 2021.
- In 2021, Twitch had an average of 105,000 streaming channels at any point.
- While Twitch streamers increased in 2021, they’ve decreased by about 10% in 2022.
- August 2022 received the highest watch time this year at 1.948 billion hours.
- More people watched eSports, like Twitch streams, in 2021 than most sports leagues, except for the NFL.
- People watched two billion hours of Twitch streams in January 2021.
- As of January 2021, the user xQc reached over 25 million watch hours.
- Annual Twitch watch hours doubled between 2019 and 2021.
- Twitch first hit two million concurrent users in 2020, probably in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Combined, Twitch viewers watch about 8 years’ worth of streams every month.
- Over 50% of all Twitch users are also creators on the platform.
- People use Twitch about 6% on the weekends compared to weekdays.
- Sundays receive about 200,000 more users than Mondays.
- About 30% of American Twitch viewers have a college degree.
- Twitch receives 87.5% of its desktop traffic directly.
- The remainder comes from social media, search engines, and referrals.
- About 18% of all Twitch streamers don’t watch any video game content.
- As many as 22.7 million people used Twitch daily in March 2020.
- In April 2020, Twitch surpassed 897 million total visitors.
- The average Twitch viewer is only 21 years old.
- You can watch clips taken from live streams, and 124 million of those clips have received a combined 1.7 billion views and counting.
- Over a million Amazon Prime users have subscribed to a Twitch channel for free with their Prime membership.
Twitch Streamers
Twitch is home to millions of streamers, though not every streamer is active every day or even every month.
The following statistics focus on streamers, from partners and affiliates to the amount of money or views top streamers get.
- Twitch saw a 45% increase in the number of partners in 2020.
- The platform topped 50,000 partners that year.
- Twitch only had 3,400 partners in 2012, meaning it has grown by 14.7 times in less than a decade.
- About 321,000 people are viewing non-gaming streams at a given time.
- As of Q3 2022, Twitch has 57.5k channels and 1.65 million affiliates.
- Almost half of the partners (48.4%) and affiliates (49.5%) are English speakers.
- The partner with the most Twitch followers is auronplay, with over 13.91 million.
- Evelone192 is the affiliate with the most followers, at 2.23 million.
- At 18.3 million, Ninja has the highest number of followers but isn’t a partner.
- Brazilian partner casimito has the highest number of subscribers of all partners, with 192.2k.
- SinderVTuber has 19.9k subscribers, the highest of any affiliate.
- There are over 28 affiliates for every Twitch partner.
- Since 2019, over 15.4 million streamers have received at least five views.
- Twitch gained 5.8 million streamers from 2020 to 2021.
- Riot Games, host of League of Legends tournaments, has the highest number of channel views.
- From 2017 to 2019, the Twitch Partner Program grew by over two-thirds.
- The average streamer received about 27.7 views per stream in January 2021.
- In the early years, the average streamer got about 449.9 views per stream.
- Pokimane is the most popular woman on Twitch, with over 8.9 million followers.
- In 2021, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez received an average of over 200,000 views per stream, the highest average of any channel.
- Streamers played Grand Theft Auto V for over 25 million hours on Twitch in 2021.
- On average, streamers who play games for 40 hours a week make anywhere from $3,000 to $5,000 in a month.
- The top 10 Twitch accounts have earned more than $50 million.
- A top streamer earned about $9.6 million from 2019 to 2021.
- Women made up only 1% of top streamers in the second quarter of 2022.
- Twitch Partners earn $3.50 to $5 for every 1,000 ad impressions.
- Over 7 million people streamed on Twitch at least once in September 2022.
Twitch Demographics
Twitch has a lot of users, and many of them are young adult males, though more women are joining the platform each year.
Still, the majority of users are less than 35 years old, and seniors make up less than 5% of the entire user base.
- Almost one-fourth (23%) of all Twitch desktop users are from the US.
- Germans make up 6% of all Twitch desktop visits.
- Russia and South Korea account for an extra 6% each of desktop visits.
- Just under three-fourths of all Twitch users (73%) are between 16 and 34 years old.
- Users ages 16 to 24 make up the largest group with 41% of all users being that age.
- Only 3% of all Twitch users are 55 years or older.
- Since 7% of Twitch users are 45 to 54, 90% of all users are 44 or younger.
- About 65% of Twitch users are male, with the remaining 35% being female.
- In 2017, only 18.5% of Twitch users were female.
- Roughly 44 million Americans watch streams on Twitch.
- That number is expected to hit 51.6 million before 2024.
Twitch Gaming
Many people know of Twitch for its gaming focus, which makes it stand out from other streaming platforms, but some gaming stats may surprise you.
From popular games to the number of views and the number of minutes people spend on Twitch, consider the following numbers.
- The top three games streamed on Twitch as of late October 2022 are League of Legends, Overwatch 2, and Dota 2.
- Those top three games receive over 150,000 stream views per week on average.
- People are streaming around 100,000 games at any one time.
- The number of concurrent streaming channels peaked at 234,924 on December 1, 2020.
- Twitch users watch about 95 minutes of live gaming per day on average.
- Roughly half of daily users watch over 20 hours per week (almost three hours per day).
- The most viewed games year to date in 2022 are League of Legends, Fortnite, and Grand Theft Auto V.
- All of those top games have received over 25 billion views each.
- Around the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, over two million people watched a Fortnite stream at a given time.
- Users have streamed over 38,000 different games on Twitch.
Twitch Use Worldwide
The US is home to the highest number of Twitch users, but it’s far from the only country with streamers and viewers.
Consider other countries where the platform is popular as well as worldwide usage trends due to the COVID-19 pandemic and other cultural shifts.
- Twitch saw a temporary decrease in streams in late February and March 2020, but it quickly picked up, though it never reached its peak of 1,443,594 from January 2020.
- Spanish is the second-most spoken language on Twitch, with 11.1% of all channels being Spanish.
- About 11.9% of concurrent Twitch viewers are watching Spanish content.
- Around 1.38 million Twitch viewers are watching English content at a given time.
- Languages rounding out the top five for both viewers and streamers are Portuguese, French, and Russian.
- German, Japanese, Korean, Italian, and Turkish round out the top 10.
- Concurrent Twitch streams increased by 55% from 2019 to 2020.
- Twitch is the second-most viewed gaming website in the world.
- The “Just Chatting” streams received about 3 billion watch hours in 2021.
- From March to April 2020, Twitch streaming hours grew by 37.4%.
- About 70% of eSports viewers use Twitch to watch eSports.
- eSports account for 21.3% of all views on Twitch.
- The number of minutes watched on Twitch increased consistently year over year from 2017 to 2021.
- At one point, there were 102,369 active subscriptions for various channels.
- The average number of active concurrent channels more than doubled from 49,000 in 2019 to 100,000+ in 2021.
- During the COVID-19 pandemic, Twitch viewership grew by 112%.
- About 35% of Twitch viewers access streams on a mobile device.
- Streamers on Twitch broadcast in over 35 languages.
- People watched over 1.3 trillion minutes of Twitch streams in 2021.
- Users have sent more than 14.2 billion chat messages on Twitch.
- Since its launch in 2015, people have sent over 153 million whispers (one-on-one conversations).
- On average, Twitch gets the most activity at 4 PM US Eastern Time.
Twitch Downloads
Many people access Twitch from a desktop or laptop and so can watch in their browser, but the iOS and Android mobile apps are also quite popular.
Hundreds of millions of Android users have downloaded the app, and it’s also one of the top-grossing apps on the Google Play Store.
- Twitch has over 100 million downloads on Google Play.
- Android users downloaded Twitch 6 million times in the second quarter of 2022 alone.
- Before the Chinese government banned it, Twitch was the third most popular app in the country.
- First-time downloads of the Twitch app increased by 14% in the US in 2020.
- Greece saw the highest increase in Twitch downloads that year, at 50%.
- Twitch is the 9th most popular iOS app in the photo and video category.
- On Google Play, Twitch is the 3rd highest-grossing entertainment app.
Twitch Revenue
Of course, Twitch is a business, and it’s been able to make good money, which has grown over the years.
Despite some quarterly dips, Twitch is still going strong, even if it’s a tiny part of the entire revenue its parent company Amazon makes.
- In 2021, Twitch made about $2.6 billion in revenue.
- That revenue meant an increase of 41% over the revenue from 2020.
- Twitch almost made 10 times as much in 2021 as in 2016.
- From 2019 to 2020, Twitch saw an increase of $660 million in revenue.
- On average, Twitch earns about $231.8 million from ads.
- The average Twitch employee (not streamer) makes six figures a year ($124,380 to be specific).
- As of 2022, Twitch is worth about $9.3 billion.
- Twitch earned $65.1 million from in-app purchases in the first quarter of 2022.
- Twitch’s in-app revenue has declined every quarter since the first quarter of 2021.
- The revenue decreased by $17.21 million from the first to second quarter of 2022.
- In 2019, Twitch brought in about $178.1 million from ads.
Twitch History
Twitch only became super popular more recently, but it’s been around for quite a while and has gone through name and ownership changes.
From purchases to deals that fell through, consider some of the history of Twitch to better understand how it got to where it is.
- Twitch was founded in 2005 as the general streaming platform Justin.tv before breaking off into its own platform.
- Amazon bought Twitch in 2014 for $970 million.
- Twitch saw the biggest year-over-year increase in streamers in 2020 with an additional 3.3 million streamers.
- The platform has raised more than $42 million from investors.
- Google almost bought Twitch for $1 billion before the Amazon deal.
- Amazon launched Twitch Prime in 2016 to give Amazon Prime members special perks on Twitch.
Twitch Competitors
Twitch faces some tough competition from platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and even Instagram, though Twitch is still a favorite in the gaming world.
Users spend two or three times as much of their time on Twitch compared to YouTube and Instagram.
- By 2026, the worldwide gaming industry will be worth about $295 billion.
- Twitch has about 22% of the market for gaming video content platforms.
- Twitch received almost five times as many watch hours as YouTube gaming in the middle of 2022.
- Facebook gaming came in third place but only received just over 10% of Twitch’s watch hours.
- Twitch livestreams get more than twice as many watch hours as YouTube videos (95 minutes compared to 40 minutes on average).
- Twitch viewers account for 14% of all YouTube video views.
- People spend about three times as many minutes on Twitch (95) compared to Instagram (32) each day.
- People watch about four times as much Twitch as TV.
- Almost half (47%) of Twitch users say they prefer the platform over YouTube gaming.
- In 2020, Twitch accounted for 91.1% of all gaming livestreams.
Other Twitch Statistics
Some Twitch statistics don’t fit into any of the above categories but are still important, such as sponsorships and user survey results.
Consider some more details about Twitch and its users and streamers as well as the platform’s more charitable side.
- Twitch is part of the overall gaming market, which is worth $37 million for PC games and $77 million for mobile games.
- Twitch affiliates make about 50% of all revenue per stream, but larger accounts can make 70%.
- Twitch partners can make money in more ways than affiliates but have to follow stricter standards.
- Four of five Twitch users say they’re okay with creators receiving brand sponsorships.
- A Twitch survey found that only about 10% of gamers live alone compared to 16% of people who don’t play games.
- Out of all websites, Twitch comes in 38th place for monthly traffic.
- In 2017, Twitch raised more than $30 million for charity.
- Overall, Twitch has raised more than $75 million and has donated that money to over 100 charities.
- Over 28,000 people visited TwitchCon 2019 per day.
- About 7 million active channels aren’t partners or affiliates.
- Twitch has sustained at least 1.5 billion monthly watch hours since April 2020.
- Sponsorships are the most profitable monetization method for streamers.
- The official Twitch Twitter account has over 9.7 million followers.
- Twitch has over 6.1 million Instagram followers.
- Amazon Prime Gaming costs $14.99 per month and includes a free Twitch subscription.
- Twitch gained 15 million new users in 2021.
- Users have “cheered” over 590 million “bits” on Twitch.
References
- https://twitchtracker.com/statistics
- https://streamscharts.com/overview
- https://www.heritage.org/defense/commentary/amazon-bought-twitch-1-billion-reason-why-defense-experts-are-watching-the-video
- https://streamscharts.com/news/twitch-partners-and-affiliates-q3-2022-statistics
- https://techjury.net/blog/twitch-stats/#gref
- https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitch-statistics/
- https://earthweb.com/twitch-statistics/
- https://startupbonsai.com/twitch-statistics/
- https://backlinko.com/twitch-users
- https://dataprot.net/statistics/twitch-stats/
- https://www.statista.com/statistics/517907/twitch-app-revenue/
- https://websitebuilder.org/blog/twitch-statistics/
- https://comparecamp.com/twitch-statistics/
- https://twitchadvertising.tv/audience/
- https://muchneeded.com/twitch-statistics/