March Twitch 2b Wildegeekwire: Ever since Twitch launched in 2011, its success has been hard to measure — but it’s just become a lot more visible.
March was the site’s biggest month to date, according to a report released by Twitch today. It saw an average of around 1 million concurrent viewers per day and more than 2 billion total hours watched. That helped push it past YouTube Live in terms of traffic volume for the first time ever, the company says.
Twitch’s big month was helped by an increase in the total number of viewers watching concurrent streams, according to data cited by Twitch’s Adam Santacaterina. That was thanks, he says, to a new feature that lets users “sleep stream” while they actually sleep. In March alone, the resulting videos gathered around 100 million hours of viewership.
The numbers don’t look like a huge surprise to some who follow the site. Twitch partnered with Tubular Labs, which has been tracking its growth and other metrics since 2012. As of March 31, its “active daily streamers” stood at 547,000 users — around 126,000 more than its previous worldwide high point in September 2015 (when it had 522K users). It also counted 6.3 million unique broadcasters.
On a daily basis, the average number of viewers per streamer was around 134, up from 76 per streamer at the same point last year. It’s worth noting that this stat doesn’t include YouTube Gaming, which launched in August.
Twitch’s success has also been felt in terms of ad revenue — or rather, RPM. In 2014, it had an RPM of $2.40 (up 58% compared to 2013). That grew to $2.65 in 2015 and $3.33 in 2016, but it was “consistently one of the highest RPMs in the industry” for the past 12 months, according to Twitch COO Anthony DiCicco. Some experts believe that we could soon see “TV-like” amounts from Twitch.
As you can see from the chart below, YouTube Gaming’s presence has been hard to measure. Twitch claims it has around 1 million daily active users, but the site doesn’t publicly release its RPM. In terms of unique visitors, it claims to have 35 million — which is just over half of Twitch’s userbase.
The only data point that YouTube gives out is time spent watching gaming videos on the site. Last October, it said that people spent nearly as much time watching gaming videos on YouTube as they did watching gaming content on Twitch.