Live streaming has become one of the most popular forms of
online entertainment today.
Sites like Twitch, YouTube and Mixer are capitalizing on a
trend of live streaming and merging another form of media
video games.
The video game industry was a $138 billion market in 2013
and there's one live streaming platform that is beating out
the competition for life streaming gaming Twitch.
The Super Bowl maybe gets let's call it 50 to 100 million
views for that you know online or on alone gets that every
single tournament.
It's hundreds of millions of people it's very global it's
every single tournament is highly viewed so that scale is
is absolutely staggering and it's only going up.
The site has over 3 million monthly streamers.
And at one point Twitch generated so much hype that both
Google and Amazon were trying to acquire the site
Twitch is one the biggest live streaming platforms.
It's viewed as a top choice for many content creators
looking to build a following.
So being live every single day I was able to like build
connections with people in a much more personal level and
at a faster pace than I did with other platforms.
When I first started streaming like beginning of high
school. So that was like around six or seven years ago,
Twitch wasn't even big back then.
They had like a couple of thousand viewers maybe the top
streamers and I was like wow people like watching them play
games. They chat about so I started streaming.
In 2018.
Twitch had the sixth highest traffic for streaming video in
the world and in January of 2019 Twitter nearly 1 billion
hours of streams watched on the site.
But before Twitch took the Internet by storm.
Launching the careers of streamers like Tyler Ninja
Blevins. The site went by a different name, Justin TV.
Justin TV was launched back in 2007 and it was developed by
Justin Kan and Emmett Schear.
In its earliest days it was a site dedicated to broadcasting
the life of the site's creator Justin Kan.
The community that formed around Justin TV was a little bit
more of a reality television show community as you'd
expect. So it was people who were attracted by the idea.
There's probably about 10,000 people on the core Justin TV
community originally who really wanted to be part of this
sort of social experiment to share Justin's life on the
Internet and it attracted a really eclectic group of people
we still are in contact with a lot of them.
It was a really interesting time.
Justin TV had a huge following and saw gamers like Ninja
using the platform broadcasting their gaming in real time.
The live streaming service would eventually pivot to set
its sights on the gaming and eSports community.
In June 2011 Twitch was announced from the same creators as
Justin TV and a few years later Justin TV shut down.
During its first year Twitch had close to 3.2
million unique visitors a month.
But the company would rapidly grow into the giant that it
is today.
In 2012, monthly visitors jumped from 3.2
million to 20 million visitors and in 2013 Twitch would
become the number one video streaming site in the video
game category with 45 million visits a month.
So when we got started on Twitch we had a goal of 25 percent
growth a month every month.
At the end of six months if we could keep our growth above
25 percent a month for gaming content we would commit and
if we couldn't we would kill the project.
And so it was transformational when we started beating that
goal. And I think the thing about it that was most
transformational was this sense that we were in charge of
our own destiny.
Twitch skyrocketed to heights that drew the attention from
tech giants Google and Amazon.
During this time it was reported that Google made strides to
acquire Twitch.
I think the reason why people are really interested in the
company right now is that they're surprised when they hear
that you know we have so many people over a million people
broadcast gaming every month.
But Twitch would grab the attention to its now parent
company Amazon and an all-cash deal with $970 million.
In the run up to being acquired by Amazon, it was a crazy
time at Twitch because we were growing really fast,
everything was breaking all the time because every system
that we had put in place turned out not to be
sufficiently scaled.
And we are replacing every component of the system.
We were adding people really fast because we have so much
to do and we were starting to make money and like we're
trying to get some real competitive attention from other
players who were starting to think oh maybe this live
streaming gaming thing is a thing.
There's just so much going on and it was a real relief when
we finally finish the process.
Twitch Prime has been massive for us and we never could
have done Twitch Prime without Amazon.
Like the ability to let any Amazon Prime customer get
benefits on Twitch and get benefits for our streamers by
upselling people into buying an Amazon Prime subscription.
It's just a great dynamic.
It's great for our streamers, it's great for our viewers,
it's great for us good for Amazon.
But Google did it miss out completely on the video game
streaming scene.
Just a year after Amazon acquired Twitch, YouTube Gaming was
launched with a mix between live streaming and video on
demand. Today, YouTube Gaming has a following of 82 million
subscribers.
Well with YouTube I'm capable of editing what I want to say.
So it's a lot more controlled with the content I want to put out.
Whereas on Twitch everything is just like you know on the spot live entertainment.
You're just kind of put in the spotlight but like that said
a lot of my YouTube content is just like VODs from my
Twitch just edited into a nice contact format.
The good thing about YouTube though is I can plan things
ahead and I can get you know four or five videos ready to
be uploaded and I could go and take a vacation if I wanted
to or go on a trip and have those videos uploaded.
But when it comes to Twitch you kind of have to be there
every single day to keep the momentum going.
Even though YouTube is one the top video websites in the world.
It still hasn't drawn in as many eyeballs as Twitch when it
comes to live streaming gaming,.
I think Twitch is a little bit more mature.
Just because it's more focused on live streaming
and they've been doing live long than anyone else.
So the tools are more fully baked, they're more developed, there's more of them.
But YouTube Gaming is making some serious strides to catch up with Twitch.
YouTube is close, so certainly
I think they are Twitch's most potent competitor today. Twitch is more mature, more focused on live, YouTube has its big advantages in other areas.
Since its beginnings Twitch has evolved from its eSports and gaming roots.
It's now into professional sports.
Back in 2018 Twitch announced it would be broadcasting
Thursday night football games for the NFL.
In partnership with Amazon Prime, we have Thursday night
football on Twitch and that's awesome.
It's been really cool particularly to watch co-streaming
Thursday night football.
This is something that we invented on Twitch to enable our
streamers to help create the experience and to become
effectively new commentators for football.
The viewers really liked it, streamers have gotten super excited about it.
We've gotten tons of outreach from streamers other
new streamers wanting to do it and I think it's actually
pointing to a new way to do sports in a multiplayer entertainment context.
But it's not just the NFL taking notice of Twitch's value.
Big brands are jumping onto the Twitch bandwagon.
Brands have a number of different ways to integrate
themselves on Twitch whether it's brand deals with
streamers ad space on the site.
Some brands even have their own twitch channel.
When it comes down to it, Old Spice they've done many
things. I think they had a squid a robotic squid that they
partnered with some Twitch streamers to help push one of
the most recent launches to the game.
I think Overwatch just signed Coca-Cola to events based
sponsorship. The brands that we see the most successful are
the brands that either take on an event sponsorship or take
on a stream or really say this we're gonna own this space.
But it's not just the big brands they're making money from
Twitch. It's also the community of gamers too.
There are over 3 million monthly broadcasters a month on
the site and 27,000 of them are Twitch Partners Twitch
Partners are streamers that can make money through paid
subscriptions, bits, ads and sponsorships and merchandising.
You can then donate bits to the person that you're watching
and those started one bit all the way up to a million bits.
And the way that works is I think for every $1.40 you get 100 bits.
The stream that you're then you know donating to for
instance gets a portion of that revenue, the rest goes Twitch.
Fans can pay $5 to $10 or even $25 a month to subscribe to a Twitch Partner streamer.
Twitch Partners are streamers that have a sizable audience
and stream either part or full-time.
Subscriptions are tiered starting I think at the bottom is
$4.99 where you can subscribe to streamers who are your
favorite right and then a portion of that stream money goes
to Twitch and a portion of that is subscriber money goes to the streamer themselves.
And once it got to a point where it was sustainable and I
could do Twitch full-time, pay the bills, that's when I
really started creating and solidifying a schedule that was
more your typical eight hour workdays five to six days a week.
So what is it about Twitch that makes people tune in?
With almost 1 billion hours of Twitch content watched by users in January of 2019.
A majority of these live streams are dedicated to watching
people play games like: Fortnite, League of Legends and Apex Legends.
In fact, Fortnite was so big on Twitch it had its own
convention hall Twitch's yearly expo called Twitch Con.
But tuning into your favorite streamer and watching them
play popular games isn't the only drive as to why people watch Twitch streamers.
A lot of it has to do with the psychology behind Twitch.
So research conducted by Sjoblom, out at all on a number of
reasons why Twitch is so popular.
So the first reason they find something called information
seeking. So this is simply going to Twitch to watch someone
play a video game who's very good at it because they want
to learn themselves how to be good at the game.
The second reason they identified with something called
tension release and this is the idea that someone may have
had a difficult day at work, they may have had a hard day
at school so they get to come home, they got to put on a
Twitch stream and they get to be entertained by someone who
is very entertaining themselves but also playing a fun game.
Twitch is a site that has a community of users who aren't
just tuning in but are actively engaging with each other.
Someone donated to the streamer saying you know I'm in a great mood.
I'm going to pass on the love because I recently just got
engaged and everyone the streamer and the audience watching
you they're were all like you know congratulations, I'm so
happy for you that's brilliant to hear.
And when you dissect that you think about the fact that this
person got engaged and their instinct may have been to tell
their family then to tell their friends and now we are at a
stage and Twitch where their next step was to tell their favorite streamer.
And that's incredible to think of what turned up social bond.
Back when Twitch first launched it had over 3,000 Twitch Partners on the site.
300,000 broadcasters each month and 72 billion minutes watched.
But in 2018, Twitch had 27000 partners, 3.4
million broadcasters and over 560 billion minutes watched.
So what does the future of Twitch look like?
As competition heats up I think we always try to do the same
thing. Which is to go back to making sure you're nailing the basics.
When you feel like there is a lot of competition around.
The most important thing is to make sure you're nailing the
very core needs and not spending too much of your time
getting distracted by shiny new things you could build in
the future and you pay attention to the core and you make
sure you're paying attention to your customers and that
they are getting the best possible service.
Because every Twitch streamer has a choice where they go and
we're very grateful that they choose to stream on us.
But we're also very aware that we're not the only people
you can do it on and I actually think that's healthy I think it's good.
I wouldn't want Twitch to be the only place you can stream live video.
I think it would be good for our streamers and I actually
don't think it would be good for Twitch in the long run.
I think you get lazy and sloppy when you don't have any competition.
And I think I'm excited to see what competitors launch all
of the time because sometimes they innovate on things.
I like to think we innovate the most.