Twitch’s 2015 Numbers Amaze, Top YouTube on Average Views

While YouTube should not be afraid yet, Twitch had an exceptionally good 2015 with impressive statistics they touted in their annual retrospective.

The Amazon-owned streaming platform did not obsess about comparing their statistics to YouTube, a company that last year packaged their gaming streams as YouTube Gaming, but it did note that Twitch viewers watched over 421 minutes of content each month, compared to YouTube’s 291 minutes.

While Twitch’s over 100 million monthly users are no match for YouTube’s over 1 billion, Twitch viewers do watch content on the channel for much longer. The community of viewers also showed deep engagement by posting 9 billion messages across the platform during 2015.

That comparison statistic and a reference to Twitch having 10x as many viewers on Twitch as on YouTube Gaming when Fallout4 launched are the only mentions of their chief rival. The rest of the report focuses on jaw-dropping numbers of minutes watched, concurrent streamers and concurrent viewers.

Their wildest number is the minutes watched on the platform, which is a staggering 241.4 billion minutes, per comScore. Twitch did the math for us already; that’s 459,366 years of viewing in a single year. Now, YouTube says viewers watch hundreds of millions of hours each day but these numbers are still impressive for the growing platform. Mobile viewing was also on the rise for Twitch. While the majority of viewers are still watching on their desktop, over 1/3 of their audience are viewing from a mobile device.

Twitch’s community of contributors is also growing. They hit a high of 35,610 concurrent streamers in 2015 as well. They also encouraged more variety in their content with the launch of Twitch Creative last November.

While Twitch claims to have an average of 550 thousand concurrent viewers, their peak number was over 2 million. This occurred when two massive eSports tournaments happened at the same time on August 23^rd, 2015. With ESL One: Cologne 2015 and the League of Legends NA LCS Finals running at the same time, the platform was able to hit a new high in this metric. The rise of eSports is factor in Twitch’s growth and they highlight the tens of millions tuning in to see these modern-day electronic gladiator battles. League of Legends was also the top game viewed on the platform in 2015. The top ten are showed below:

Twitch also noted that 2015 saw over 17 million dollars raised for charity on the platform though likeminded groups like Extra Life, Games Done Quick and Gaming For Good.

To see the full report, visit Twitch’s 2015 Retrospective Page.

Images Source: Twitch