Twitch is doing its yearly retrospective during a stream called the Twitch Holiday Spectacular, where the company looks back on all the milestones the platform hit this year. Twitch said it was “a banner year” for the company and its streamers.
“We love celebrating the community and their achievements,” Twitch chief marketing officer Kate Jhaveri said in a statement. “Our role is to support everyone who helps create live, interactive, and shared entertainment that makes Twitch so unique and we’ll keep that focus in 2019 with more tools, opportunities, and experiences to ensure the community continues to thrive.”
Twitch said the number of Partner and Affiliate streamers who can generate revenue on Twitch grew more than 86 percent from 2017. More than 248,000 streamers earned Affiliate status and more than 7,800 became Partners. Twitch launched the Affiliate program in 2017—it’s essentially a tier below Partner, but above being just a regular streamer. Affiliates can earn bits from viewers and collect subscriptions, which are ways that streamers can monetize their content. (It’s worth noting that a lot of streamers can monetize their streams, but not many make a ton of money doing it.)
Streamers overall increased from two million in 2017 to more than three million in 2018. Twitch said almost a half a million streamers go live on Twitch each day. Generally, there are more than a million people on Twitch on average at any given time, Twitch added. Those users have watched 434 billion minutes of Twitch streams this year, which is up from the 355 billion minutes of content watched last year.
Other records were broken this year: Ninja, a Fortnite streamer who’s probably the most popular gamer, broke 628,000 concurrent viewers while streaming with Drake. The month after, he broke that record again when he got 667,000 viewers to watch the opening of the Las Vegas Esports Arena.
ELEAGUE’s Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Major grand final match broke one million concurrent viewers, setting the record for a single organization’s channel, while E3 set the record for highest concurrent viewership across all of Twitch with over 2.9 million people watching. The last record was set in January 2018 with 2.5 million viewers.
Lastly, there’s a new emote on the top of the overall leaderboard: LUL. Kappa is no longer on top, where it’s sat since 2011. In third place for emotes is PogChamp. And to that we say, PogChamp.
