We have written quite a few articles on Twitch, including Influencer Marketing on Twitch – Can Twitch Improve Your Bottom Line? We have discovered that it is an ideal network for brands that sell to a market of typical gamers. There are a surprising number of websites offering statistics and analytics relating to Twitch. If you are a Twitch streamer, Twitch provides you with a detailed dashboard, analyzing your own gaming and broadcasting on the platform. We present selected Twitch statistics that highlight just how popular the network is. We have prepared this article in January 2022, and the statistics quoted refer to the last year unless otherwise stated.

42 Useful Twitch Stats for Influencer Marketing Managers:

1. 233,935 Concurrent Channels at Peak

TwitchTracker reports that the all-time peak for concurrent channels on Twitch occurred on December 1, 2020, when there were 233,935 simultaneous streams. Interestingly, the best day in 2021 also occurred in December (December 4), when there was a peak of 211,931 channels.

2. 105,000 Average Concurrent Live Channels

TwitchTracker also informs us that in 2021 there was an average of 105,000 concurrent live channels broadcasting at any time. This is a sizable jump on 2020’s 87,500 and 2019’s 49,500 average concurrent live channels. There was a clear trend of Twitch channel numbers increasing dramatically in 2020 due to the early Covid lockdowns, falling slightly in the first half of 2021 and then by a more significant percentage in the latter half of 2021. However, there are still many more concurrent channels than in 2019, pre-Covid.

Although we think of Twitch as being primarily a platform where gamers can stream their playing, the most popular category is the aptly named Just Chatting. The average number of viewers who are “Just Chatting” at any moment in time was 364,882 in December 2021, which is greater than the most popular game, League of Legends, which averaged 128,092 viewers (although that rose to 223,716 in mid-January 2022). A previous version of this post listed Fortnite as the most popular game. However, Fortnite channels now only have 91,015 viewers on average, putting it behind Just Chatting, League of Legends, Grand Theft Auto V, Escape from Tarkov, and Valorant.

4. 2,331,987 Peak Views of Fortnite

Despite our comments regarding the decline in numbers watching Fortnite, the game hit its peak viewing during the first Covid lockdown. Sullygnome reports that the peak viewing of Fortnite, so far, came in June 2020 when the most watching a Fortnite game at any moment in time was 2,331,987.  Fortnite had a particularly good day in December 2021, peaking at 1,270,408 concurrent viewers. This is up from a peak viewership of just 371,676 in the previous month.

5. 7.5 Million Active Streamers

2020 saw a sharp jump in the total number of active channels. The year began with 3,935,308 active streamers in January. After a slight drop in February, this rose to 5,080,031 total active channels in March. It then skyrocketed to 7,213,644 active channels as the effects of COVID lockdowns became apparent. Since then, there have been more than 7 million channels each month, peaking at 9,894,745 total active channels in January 2021. Numbers fell during 2021 as people returned to work and school but were still 7,573,965 by December 2021.

6. Ninja Was Watched for 151,096,501 hours in 2017 Before (Temporarily) Defecting to Mixer

Ninja was the most popular channel on Twitch for many years. In 2017, his followers watched him for a total of 151,096,501 hours. Ninja streamed for 3,329 hours. The bulk of Ninja’s viewing came after March 2017, with a peak of 439,866 viewers on April 22. The vast majority of his gaming at that time was on Fortnite, although he often plays Valorant now. Ninja subsequently moved to the rival streaming platform, Mixer, until Microsoft announced its closure on July 22, 2020. After that, Ninja streamed on YouTube for a while but later returned to Twitch. As of January 2022, viewers have watched Ninja for a total of 343 million hours since November 17, 2016. In that time, he has streamed 10,543 hours for 564 million views.

7. 3 Billion Hours Spent Watching the Just Chatting Community in 2021

As we mentioned above, the community with the most watch time over recent years has been Just Chatting. Just Chatting channels streamed for 38,697,240 hours and were watched for 3,020,771,657 hours in 2021. At peak, they had 2,787,896 viewers.

8. The Most Watched Game in 2021 was Grand Theft Auto V

It may be nearly a decade since Rockstar released Grand Theft Auto V, but the game is still highly popular on Twitch. Grand Theft Auto V channels streamed for 25,465,235 hours and were watched for 1,874,989,023 hours in 2021. At peak, they had 1,154,832 viewers, although League of Legends had a much larger 3,087,270 peak viewers.

9. 88.7 Million Hours Streamed in a Month

January 2021 was incredibly busy for the streamers of Twitch. In that month, streamers broadcast for a total of 88,697,867 hours.  However, the most significant boost (ignoring a 74% jump back in July 2013 when numbers were small) came in April 2020, when streaming hours increased by 37.44%, compared to the previous month. This came on top of a 31.12% increase in March that year.

10. 25.1 Viewers Per Streamer

Although the number of streamers has risen in recent years, the average number of viewers per streamer hasn’t changed markedly. As of January 2021, each streamer had 27.7 viewers on average.  Numbers have stayed relatively static in recent years, rising or falling by no more than 8% per month. It was a different story in Twitch’s early days, however. Back in November 2012, streamers averaged 49.9 viewers per stream, dropping gradually until 2019, where it plateaued with slight monthly variations.

More people view Twitch streams on a Sunday than any other day – 2,354,600 on average over the last six months. Viewing numbers then drop to their weekly lowest on Monday (averaging 2,131,000) before rising again each day until the following weekend. There are 6% more viewers on weekends than on weekdays. On average, the most channels operate on a Saturday – 103,600 – followed by 99,200 on Sunday. As with viewers, there are overall fewest channels to view on a Monday, increasing each weekday. Overall, there are 9% more streams to choose from at the weekend than on weekdays.

12. Alexa Ranking of 46

Alexa gives a ranking of popular websites. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Google tops the Alexa rankings, followed by YouTube.  Twitch.tv ranks number 46, just behind LinkedIn. Some notable websites that rank lower than Twitch include eBay, Apple, and Adobe.

13. TwitchCon 2019 Had 28,000 Visitors Per Day

Twitch even has a real-world event, TwitchCon. There were 35,000 attendees the first time they held it in 2016. In 2017, it was held in Long Beach, with 50,000 people turning up. TwitchCon hasn’t publicly released the number of visitors to the 2018 event in San Jose, but it suffered from overcrowding and was clearly popular.  There was some confusion with the official figures for the 2019 event too, but the San Diego Union-Tribune estimated 25,000 visitors per day for the three-day event. However, later estimates placed this at 28,000. Unfortunately, Covid caused the cancellation of the 2020 event, although one is currently scheduled for October 2022.

14. Twitch Was 3rd in Chinese iOS Market Before Being Banned in 2018

Like many social platforms, Twitch has run afoul of at least one government.  The Chinese government has heavily censored its internet. Unfortunately, it doesn’t publish a list of the websites it blocks, so this means that users tend to learn about the demise of a site in China through first-hand experience.  Back in 2018, Twitch was taking off in China and was popular with China’s gaming community. However, in September 2018, the Chinese government clearly decided that Twitch was inappropriate for its citizens (or even visitors to China) and banned the app. At the time, it was reportedly the third most popular free app in the Chinese iOS App Store.

15. Ibai Enjoyed 1,538,645 Peak Viewers for a Single Stream

SullyGnome collects a list of the highest peak viewership of Twitch streamers over various periods. If we look at the data for the last 365 days, the highest number for a channel (excluding corporate channels like PlayStation and Riot Games) was Spanish internet celebrity, streamer, eSports caster, Ibai (aka Ibai Llanos). He managed to peak at 1,538,645 viewers during a stream in May 2021.

16. 209,080 Highest Average Viewers for a Channel in 2021

We can also discover information about average viewers from SullyGnome. Inevitably, every streamer’s number of average viewers is considerably fewer than their number of peak viewers. The highest number of average viewers in 2021 belongs to American politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who goes by AOC. She averaged 209,080 viewers over 2021. This figure is somewhat inflated because AOC only broadcast two streams in Just Chatting on Friday, January 29, 2021. She had 308,422 viewers at peak.  Second place went to a Russian-language channel, dota2ti_ru, that broadcasted ten days of eSports with gamers competing in the Dota 2 Championships held in Romania in October 2021. The Russian language channel averaged 179,289 viewers, peaking at 812,818 viewers. Notably, the English language version of the same channel had the fifth-highest average viewership in October 2021, averaging 160,888 viewers, also over ten days in October. The" regular gamer" with the highest average number of viewers over 2021 was Thomas “Tom” Simons (TommyInnit), who averaged 164,430 viewers, watching 24,746,680 hours. His peak viewership reached 650,237 viewers.

17. Ninja Once Again Has the Most Followers – 17+ Million

It probably surprises nobody to learn that Ninja has the most followers. Except that for quite some time, he didn’t – he spent much of 2019 and 2020 playing on the now-defunct Mixer platform. During that time, Tfue temporarily took over as Twitch’s most-followed streamer. Although Ninja left Twitch for some time, he never closed his account. This meant that many of his previous followers continued to follow his account, even though it lay dormant, in hiatus. However, he later returned and added a further 704,936 followers in 2021. He now has 17,382,149 people following him. Others have had a more significant increase in followers over 2021, however. For example, AdinRoss streamed for 1,031 hours last year and gained 4,763,772 followers. Auronplay also added 4,557,864 followers last year, following a similar increase in 2020.

Although Twitch has a clear male bias, women are becoming more visible, as we referred to above. The most popular of all is pokimane, with 8,905,103 followers. This gives her the title of the 9th most popular streamer on Twitch overall.

19. $40 Million in Prizes for Dota-2 Based International 2021, Partially Streamed on Twitch

While not all eSports appear on Twitch, the two are closely connected. Therefore, you will find that most significant eSports tournaments stream on some Twitch channel.  Although delayed due to COVID-19, the 10th edition of The International, Dota 2’s largest yearly tournament, finally occurred in late 2021. As a result of international lockdowns, there was no 2020 edition of The International. In 2021 the community contributed over $38.4 million in prize money, adding to Valve’s annual $1.6 million base.  Valve has contributed $1.6 million as a prize seed at every tournament since 2011. Since 2013, fans have contributed to the pot by purchasing the Dota 2 battle pass, where 25% of the cost is sent directly to the TI prize pool. 

The combined funds available for the 2021 tournament were just over $40 million.  Team Spirit (from the Russian Federation and Ukraine) took the coveted top spot and won $18.2 million. 

20. Despite a Push from YouTube, Twitch Still responsible for 70% of eSports Viewing

According to Stream Hatchet, despite YouTube pushing to secure more eSports viewership, Twitch was responsible for about 70% of the live Average Minute Audience (AMA) from the events over a selected weekend in January 2020. YouTube’s exclusive broadcast partner, the Call of Duty League, accounted for about 20% of their live AMA across the six listed events.

21. Stream Titles containing COVID-19 keywords like “COVID” saw a 133k% increase in hours watched

Stream Hatchet has analyzed that stream titles containing COVID-19 keywords like “COVID,” “Corona,” “Virus,” or “Pandemic” saw a 133k% increase in hours watched since December 30, 2019. In just one week, the number of unique channels streaming with COVID-19 related titles increased 542% from the week of March 2 to the week of March 15, 2020.

Unsurprisingly, nearly half of all Twitch channels that broadcast over the last week (in late January 2022) did so in English. However, the second most popular language used on Twitch is Spanish, with an average of 11,000 Spanish-language channels being viewed by 390,000 concurrent viewers over the week. Spanish-language channels average 10.2% of all live Twitch channels, receiving 13.23% of Twitch’s viewers. The following few most popular languages used on Twitch in the last week were German, Portuguese, Russian, French, and Korean. It must be remembered that Twitch has been banned in China since 2018 and has yet to take off in India. However, this didn’t stop Chinese from taking the tenth position for average concurrent channels.

24. By 2019, 35% of Twitch Users Were Female

We have often quoted the comScore 2017 statistic that 81.5% of Twitch users were male. This probably doesn’t surprise too many people, as the stereotypical gamer is male. It did, however, indicate some variation between the average Twitch user and typical gamers, according to the Entertainment Software Association. Their statistics suggest that a much higher 41% of gamers are women. However, according to BusinessofApps, GlobalWebIndex stats from Q2 2019 show a (slightly) more balanced situation. These suggest that 65% of Twitch users are male and 35% female, which still doesn’t equate with the Entertainment Software Association’s game-playing stats but is noticeably closer. To be honest, though, most game advertisers still tend to focus on male gaming. Clearly, fewer female gamers are willing to share their gaming experience on Twitch than their male counterparts.

25. 73% of Twitch Users Are Under 35

The GlobalWebIndex analyzed Twitch demographics in detail in 2019, although they don’t appear to have published more recent data. According to that research, “3 in 10 global internet users aged 16-64 now say they’ve watched a live gaming stream recently, rising to 42% of 16-24s.”  GlobalWebIndex surveyed 15,853 Twitch users aged 16-64. The age split from this survey was:

16 to 24 – 41% 25 to 34 – 32% 35 to 44 – 17% 45 to 54 – 7% 55 to 64 – 3%

Presumably, some kids younger than 16 and a few people older than 65 also watch Twitch streams. However, of the people surveyed, 73% were aged 16 to 34.

26. Twitch Has More Than 30 Million+ Daily Active Visitors

Back in 2017, Twitch reported that it enjoyed over 15 million daily active users watching video streaming each day. Obviously, most Twitch users don’t stream their own games, but they enjoy being entertained by their heroes in action, commentating on their games as they play them. More recently, Twitch reports that it has 30 million+ daily active visitors. While “users” and “visitors” may not mean precisely the same thing, it’s clear that many more people watch Twitch streams now than before Covid-19. On average, over 2.5 million people watched Twitch streams at any given time.

27. Twitch Reaches 8.46 Million Monthly Broadcasters During 2021

With people staying home, watching, and playing games, 2020 and 2021 saw a massive rise in Twitch’s number of broadcasters. We have taken many of the Twitch usage statistics from TwitchTracker. Back in 2012, Twitch only had 300,000 unique broadcasters per month. It tripled this number in 2013, to 900,000. It broke the million mark in 2014 with 1.5 million broadcasters per month.  The number of broadcasters grew relatively steady over the next few years: 1.7 million in 2015, 2.2 million in 2016, the rather vague “2+” million in 2017, 3.39 million in 2018, and 3.64 million in 2019. However, Twitch saw a tremendous leap in broadcaster numbers in 2020, reaching 6.9 million monthly streamers. This boost continued into 2021 when Twitch reached 8.46 million monthly broadcasters.

28. 1,460 Billion Minutes Watched

With more streamers and viewers on Twitch, inevitably, there has been a rapid rise in the number of minutes watched on the platform. Total minutes watched over the last few years have been:

2016 – 292 billion total minutes watched 2017 – 355 billion total minutes watched 2018 – 560 billion total minutes watched 2019 – 660 billion total minutes watched 2020 – 840 billion total minutes watched 2021 – 1,460 billion total minutes watched.

29. 124 Million + Total Clips

According to the 2017 Year in Review, there are now more than 124 million clips uploaded to Twitch. And these were viewed over 1.7 billion times. Unfortunately, we don’t have any more recent data than this, but undoubtedly people upload even more clips to Twitch nowadays.

30. $30 Million + Raised for Charity

Twitch also proudly reported that broadcasts on their platform raised more than $30 million for charity in 2017.

31. 2.4 Million Viewers Simultaneously Watched a Single Channel

The overall record for concurrent Twitch views was the 2,468,668 peak concurrent viewers who watched Fortnite gamer David “TheGrefg” Cánovas Martínez on January 11, 2021. He created this record and the record for the most concurrent viewers for a Twitch stream by an individual. During this stream, TheGrefg revealed his personal Fortnite skin. He already held the record for a solo streamer, but in this broadcast, he beat the record for all-time viewers, until then held by major broadcasters like ELEAGUE and PlayStation.

32. 436,000 People Watched a Game Premiere

More than 436,000 people viewed the premiere of Bungie and Activision’s Destiny 2 on Twitch in 2017.

33. 95 Minutes per Day on Average

According to Twitch, their average user spends 95 minutes per day watching live gaming. This is certainly much longer than the daily time spent on the typical social network. Instagram, for instance, claims that its younger users average 32 minutes a day on its app. It is even more than the average mobile viewing session on YouTube, which is just over 40 minutes. In total, Twitch audiences watched over 1.46 trillion minutes of video content in 2021, compared to just 660 billion minutes in 2019.

34. 740,000 or 697,977 Twitch Affiliates

Stream Scheme estimates that Twitch has an estimated 740,000 Twitch affiliates that play games. However, TwitchStats places the number at 697,977.

35. 27,000 or 44,842 or 51,000 Twitch Partners (Depending on Your Source)

According to Twitch help files,  the streaming platform has now accepted 27,000 of its more influential broadcasters into the Twitch Partnership scheme. These are the people Twitch considers most likely to monetize their streams and who most frequently work with brands. A key benefit of being a Twitch Partner is sharing in advertising revenue and selling merchandise through official Twitch channels. Statista reports, however, that the number of Twitch Partners reached 51,000 worldwide as of March 2021. And TwitchStats says that there are 44,842 partners.

36. 21.3% of Twitch Viewing is eSports

Market researcher Newzoo found that eSports account for 21.3% of Twitch’s viewing. eSports has become a huge driver of video traffic. We have previously looked at the incredible spread of eSport in recent years in Influencer Marketing in eSports | The Rise of eSports’ Influence on Brands.

37. 22% of Twitch.tv Viewers Come from the United States

According to data collated by SimilarWeb, the most frequent visitors to the Twitch website on desktop come from the United States, making up 21.96% of the site’s total visitors. This is more than three times the traffic generated from any other country. Germans are the second largest group of visitors at 6.85%, followed by South Koreans at 4.64%, Russians at 4.07%, and Canadians at 4.06%.  Unfortunately, we don’t have mobile visitor location data or app usage, and there are probably many more visitors on these nowadays.

38. 100,000+ Active Subscriptions 

According to TwitchTracker, Casimito currently has the most active subscriptions – 102,369. Of these, 6,480 are gifted. The vast majority of these are Prime subscriptions (i.e., members of Twitch Prime who have chosen to apply their single included subscription to Casimito’s account).

39. 16.00 EST is Twitch’s Peak Viewing Time

Somewhat surprisingly for a platform dominated by Americans, according to Twitchstats, the peak viewing time on Twitch is 16:00 EST. Conversely, the lowest viewing time is precisely 12 hours from that – 4:00 EST.

40. 2.307 Billion Hours Watched in One Month

TwitchTracker keeps track of the total time people spend watching Twitch each month. In 2017, this figure hovered around the 500-600 million level each month before jumping to 700 million in January 2018 and then reaching 800 million for the first time later that year. January is clearly a popular time for people watching live streaming because a year later, in January 2019, Twitch reached 900 million monthly viewers for the first time. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was January 2020 when Twitch reached its next milestone of 1 billion monthly hours watched. Numbers continued to rise over the remainder of 2020 into 2021, although they fell again in the second half of 2021, with the world opening up with fewer lockdowns. Yet again, January was a defining month, with Twitch reaching the 2 billion milestone in January 2021.  To date, the month with the highest number of hours watched was May 2021, when people viewed 2,307,473,592 hours on Twitch. 

41. 2.895 Million Average Concurrent Viewers

TwitchTracker reports that as of January 2022, the average number of concurrent Twitch viewers at any point in time is 2.895 million. This is an increase from 2021’s average of 2.778 million concurrent viewers and 2020’s 2.117 average concurrent viewers. 20 2020’s figures had been an accelerated boost from the 1.26 million in 2019. Previous growth was at a steadier rate: 1.07 million in 2018, 747K in 2017, 603K in 2016, 539K in 2015, 351K in 2014, 208K in 2013, and 102K in 2012.

42. $2 Billion Twitch Revenue