Esports is not just about playing video games, it’s about streaming and watching esports streams as well. When enthusiastic games are not playing their favorite video games, they spend hours on streaming websites, watching the pros play and learning tricks from them. According to NJ Games and their infographic named “The Rise of Esports,” the three most popular esports streaming services today are Twitch, YouTube, and Mixer.
At the moment, Twitch is the biggest one of the three, as well as one of the biggest video streaming services in the world, in general. Its future already looked promising in 2014, when Amazon decided to buy it for $970 million in cash. Today, Twitch accounts for 1.8% of all Internet traffic and 43% of all live-streaming traffic. That’s even more than YouTube!
Moreover, after one month online, Twitch already had 8 million users and today has 55 million unique users, which is a huge growth in a short period of time. These users are quite active as well, as they spend more than 100 minutes per day on average on the website.
The second-largest streaming service is YouTube, which generates a lot of revenue from esports streaming as well. In 2018, the number of monthly active esports streamers on YouTube live has increased by 36.6%. Even though there are no indications that YouTube will catch up with Twitch, it’s streaming activity will certainly continue to grow. In the first quarter of 2017, YouTube generated almost $1 million just on total tip volume.
Finally, Mixer is another big player on the esports streaming scene, even though it is far from reaching the success of Twitch and YouTube. Mixer was bought by Microsoft in 2016 for $5 million when it had around 100,000 users. Mixer has the lowest latency compared to the other two services, so the only thing it lacks for success is better marketing.
If you’re interested in learning more about esports streaming and esports in general, check out the NJ Games infographic below.
