E-sports do not stop growing, and they do it hand in hand with live streaming platforms, specially designed to enable gamers to broadcast their gaming sessions live and to interact with huge audiences that enjoy watching them play, give them advice, chat and sometimes they even send them gifts.
Founded in 2011 and acquired in 2014 by Amazon in a $970 million deal, Twitch has long ago become the go-to option for those who want to become streamers. “In uncertain times, community and entertainment are more important than ever. In this 2020, viewers are finding both on Twitch,” the company asserts.
Apart from the technology applied to live streaming, which is constantly evolving to offer an experience free of flaws or common problems for these platforms, such as lag, Twitch works hard in its community, giving special importance to the interaction between streamers and their viewers, as well as between people from the same audience.
To create these communities, Twitch targets a youthful audience, and its numbers confirm that its strategy is working: 21% of the platform's users are between 13 and 17 years old, while there are 50% between 18 and 34. At the same time, 74% of them admit to being constantly connected online, and 73% say they are willing to try new products. This is key data for advertisers, as there are 54% of users who would buy a product or service simply to be part of the experience or the community associated with that product.
● AN AUDIENCE WITH MULTIPLE INTERESTS
Perhaps more linked to gaming, which was its main focus in its beginnings, Twitch expanded its borders and currently presents an audience with multiple interests. In detail, 59% of platform users say they are interested in technology, 59% in music, 55% in movies, 53% in video games, 53% in food and beverages, 51 % in sports and 50% in cookery.
Even so, gaming remains its greatest attraction, and it is, at the same time, the segment with the greatest projection. In fact, according to data from the company itself, it is estimated that by 2022 the global video game market will grow to $196 billion. At the same time, due to a bigger infrastructure and an increasing appetite for e-sports, Latin America is considered the fastest growing region worldwide.
In 2019, it was projected that 145.4 million of the 252.6 million Latin American players were going to invest money in games, with an average annual expense of $38 dollars. Growth in Latin America will be in both in mobile video games and electronic sports competitions.
Within Twitch, the most popular videogame is "League of Legends," which accumulates 19.8MM of viewing hours. It is followed by "Counter Strike" (12.6MM), "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare" (8.3MM) and "Minecraft" (8MM). Among all those games, however, there is one category that stands out without being so closely linked to gaming: it is the Twitch channel "Just chatting," which accumulates 15.1MM of viewing hours and, as the name implies, simply presents people talking.
Finally, to gauge the magnitude of this phenomenon, data from Twitch indicates that almost half a million streamers broadcast live on the platform every day. Additionally, there are over 3 million unique streaming channels each month, and based on the latest measurements, 505 billion minutes of content were viewed within the platform, which is the equivalent to 960,807 years.
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