Twitch more than doubled its viewership in 2022 compared to 2019, the last time the numbers weren’t inflated due to lockdowns because of the COVID-19 pandemic, suggesting there’s been exponential growth.
Twitch’s lowest month of viewership in September 2022 had 1.733 billion hours watched, which was still higher than 2019’s peak of 932 million in July, according to data from Rainmaker.gg, the analytics partner of StreamElements. Every other month was even higher, with a peak of 2.059 billion hours watched in January 2022, dwarfing the 871 million hours watched in the same month two years prior by more than double.
Gil Hirsch, the co-founder of StreamElements, said the data proves there is “no question the platform has grown a lot even as its inflated pandemic-era numbers trended downward.”
The uptick during that period may have had an impact, but it’s too early to tell if the Amazon-owned streaming titan will trend upwards again or continue to slowly lose viewers until it reaches pre-pandemic levels.
There’s also the possibility of platforms like TikTok curbing Twitch’s momentum in the future, especially if it starts signing streamers like YouTube, who has proven to be one of Twitch’s biggest rivals in the platform wars after Mixer collapsed and Facebook Gaming fell short of the mark.
In the meantime, however, it looks like Twitch is in excellent shape based on the post-pandemic viewership numbers in the report. It will almost certainly be happy with the way things are going, especially if it continues into 2023.
Published: Jan 19, 2023 12:00 pm