Video game streaming site Twitch, now owned by Amazon, said today that it has crossed 100 million monthly unique viewers — versus 45 million at the same time last year and 20 million the year before that.
Twitch’s Monthly Viewers More Than Doubled (Again) in 2014
Doubled to 100 million, which is a lot more than the 4.7 million gamers YouTube was claiming a few years ago.
Twitch
That’s a pretty good jump, especially since most of that growth appears to have happened after the $1.1 billion acquisition was announced in August. At that time, Twitch had just 55 million monthly viewers.
For comparison’s sake: In 2011, the year Twitch launched out of a skunkworks initiative at Justin.tv, YouTube was telling prospective advertisers that it was capable of reaching 4.7 million gamers every month. The increasing ease of livestreaming games, and the growth of eSports like League of Legends, has grown the pie considerably in the four years since.
Twitch’s “2014 Retrospective,” however, also made a point of recognizing some of the non-gaming content now found on the site — including broadcasts of live music concerts and documentary movies, which run alongside the site’s chaotic-but-fun live chatrooms. It’s a curious choice for the site, given that a widely agreed-upon key to its early growth was focusing on just gaming rather than Justin.tv’s kitchen-sink portfolio of live video content. But if the 100 million benchmark can be sustained (Update: Twitch says the number came from December 2014), something is clearly working.
Notably, viewership appears to be growing faster than the number of “broadcasters” — folks pushing out video — on the site. While monthly broadcasters tripled from 300,000 to 900,000 between 2012 and 2013, in 2014 the number ticked up to 1.5 million. Almost all of those are amateurs and casual game streamers, though; the number of broadcasters who share ad revenue with Twitch through the site’s Partner program was 5,100 in 2013 and 10,000 in 2014.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
