Twitch Dominates

New reports suggest that, despite massive investments from rivals such as YouTube and Facebook Gaming, Twitch continues to dominate the livestreaming industry.

Twitch has long been the go-to platform for both new and experienced streamers. It’s widely regarded as the first live streaming site, and it’s centered exclusively on discovering and following your favorite broadcasters. Rival platforms, on the other hand, have been exerting increasing pressure in recent years. To entice top Twitch streamers away, the two biggest — YouTube Gaming and Facebook Gaming — have offered big-money offers across many genres. 

Over time, we’ve seen names like TimTheTatman, Ludwig, DisguisedToast, and Dr Disrespect end up on competing platforms, but it doesn’t appear to be having the intended impact. While each platform has its own benefits and redeeming qualities, neither can compete with Twitch in terms of viewership.

Twitch accounted for about 71 percent of total streaming hours in 2021, according to the graph below from StreamHatchet. In 2021, it averaged over 6 billion hours watched per quarter, whereas YouTube and Facebook each averaged roughly 1.1-1.3 billion hours watched per quarter. 

Surprisingly, YouTube was the only platform to see a year-over-year drop in viewing between Q2 and Q4. Not only that, but Twitch was home to all of the top ten most popular streams. Despite the fact that YouTube has a lot of great personalities, none of them have been able to attract as much attention as Twitch’s top stars. To no one’s surprise, xQc took the lead with 272 million hours viewed, much ahead of second-place Gaules’ 165 million hours watched.

While Twitch’s dominance over the livestreaming space was undeniable, these figures demonstrate just how much of a hold they still have on both streamers and viewers. YouTube and Facebook will be looking for the best strategies to close this gap as quickly as possible in 2022.