Why Twitch could be Google's best buy

...since Youtube, anyway. Twitch is a massively popular platform for watching live-stream of video games in e-sports tournaments, with some game-playing content creators even making their entire living from ad-generated revenue on their videos. Assuming the WSJ, The Verge and Variety are all on to something Google could be about to make a very important acquisition, for $1 billion (£594 million).

As soon as “video games” were mentioned a large chunk of the mainstream media let out an audible sigh and devoted column inches to the question of – “but why would you want to watch someone else play games?!”. In the same way that Match of the Day starts each week with Gary Lineker asking,  – “So Alan, why do people want to watch other people play football?”

As it happens people are watching other people play games – more people are watching Twitch than MTV, ESPN and Breaking Bad.

With 45,000,000 monthly users Twitch is the fourth biggest source of web traffic on the net at peak times in the US, behind only Google, Netflix and Apple. In the process beating Facebook, Valve, Amazon and Hulu. All of these statistics add up to make Twitch a massive character in the theatre of the internet and while it may belong to an audience that's largely misunderstood, it’s by no means small audience.

What’s more they’re highly engaged - the average users watches 106 minutes of video a day, compared to YouTube’s 15 minutes – and they’re obsessive about forming communities and innovating with the whole structure of live-streaming. Beyond that, perhaps most importantly of all, they’re young, with the average age user only at 21 Twitch could feasibly take many of its devotees with it for years to come. Twitch is also breaking out of its box and into increasingly less-niche territory, its native integration with both Xbox One and Playstation 4 means that it will end up in the living rooms of possibly hundreds of millions of people. More homes in the US own games consoles than don’t.

Twitch's audience of high-spending 18-34 year old men (although 1 in 3 users is female) is actually one of the hardest for advertisers to reach  as these people are abandoning TV and other platforms where they'd be ripe for traditional advertising.

Twitch is, in short, on a massive roll. It’s the YouTube of live-streaming, a leader in a game of one player, it’s increased exponentially in scale without losing engagement amongst its users. With a healthy degree of cynicism you could argue Google is buying the only even slightly viable competitor to YouTube’s market share. But its scale sees it creak from time to time, its service isn’t necessarily running at optimum and now Google with their blank cheques and fearless innovation can buy, develop and design Twitch’s way to untouchable, monolithic stability.