...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?”
Twitch's not unimpressive statistics, taken from their brilliantly informative 2013 report.
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.
