Twitch is the reigning streaming champion, and a new report reveals just how popular it was last month.
Twitch is pretty much synonymous with online streaming, though Facebook and YouTube are attempting to take some of that away from the platform. While Twitch viewership fell during the September boycott, which was sparked by people’s perceptions that little was being done about “hate raids,” the website remains the most popular place for gamers to stream and for the community to talk and meet to streamers. With that, some figures showing how popular the site was last month have been released.
According to a report, Twitch saw an increase in activity in October, with analytics showing that viewers watched around 1.9 million hours of content, up 19 percent from the previous year. It indicates that the platform is on the rise, though the figures do not explain why there has been a recent increase, but it does show that this is the highest level since the beginning of summer. Rainmaker.gg, a partner of streaming service StreamElements, conducted the research.
In comparison, Facebook Gaming, the company’s streaming platform, saw 512 million hours of viewing last month, up 61% year over year. While this is still a sizable number, it pales in comparison to Twitch’s. However, given that Facebook only entered the streaming ring in 2018, it has some catching up to do and will most likely compete with YouTube.
The report goes on to discuss which games were the most popular to watch, in addition to the overall figures and the sheer number of hours that people have been dedicating to Twitch. MOBA games like League of Legends and Dota 2 were among the top four channels in October, with the former seeing a 98 percent increase in viewership, totaling 205 million hours, and the latter seeing an 189 percent increase.
Despite this, Twitch has been the subject of some controversy over the last few months. The most recent of these were the aforementioned hate raids, in which broadcasters and their communities were inundated with toxic viewers who incited hate speech and disrupted streams. Twitch also offers some raid-related countermeasures, which are a step in the right direction, but many people felt it was too little, too late. Some major streamers have also jumped ship to other platforms. However, the statistics above show that, for the time being, the Amazon-owned site remains the streaming champion.