When the world shut down last year, folks overwhelming tuned to live streams to connect with others and avoid boredom while staying at home. And that pandemic-driven growth is showing no signs of slowing down, even as the world tries to get back to normal, with both Twitch and Facebook Gaming seeing record numbers of viewers in the first quarter of 2021, according to the last numbers
Popular live streaming software provider StreamLabs released its first quarterly report on the streaming industry for 2021 on Friday. Using data collected by a streaming analytics company Stream Hatchet from the beginning of January to the end of March, it offers some interesting insights, most notably that Facebook Gaming is approaching YouTube Gaming’s spot for the # 2 most popular streaming service. First up is longtime leader Twitch, which still easily controls most of the market with over 72% of the total hours of content viewed this year.
If you (like me) have never really done that with live streaming, you might be surprised to learn how massive the industry has become in such a short space of time. At Amazon-owned Twitch, the number of viewers, hours streamed, average number of concurrent viewers, and number of channels have roughly doubled since last year, StreamLabs said. Twitch broke its audience record for the second quarter in a row with users watching 6.3 billion hours of content, an increase of nearly 1 billion hours compared to last quarter. The platform also saw its largest quarterly increase in streamed hours since the early days of the pandemic, from approximately 230 million hours to 265 million hours.
While Twitch is best known for streaming video games, the most popular category remains “Just Chatting”. Considered the successor to Twitch’s ill-defined IRL section, which was reconfigured into 13 different non-gaming categories in 2018, this category covers exactly what its name implies: content where streamers just hang out and chat with viewers or real-world shenanigans.
“Just Chatting” achieved no less than 754 million viewing hours in Q1 this year. To put that figure in perspective, Grand Theft Auto V, the most watched game on Twitch in 2021 536.3 million hours, with League of Legends not far behind at 534 million.
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Facebook Gaming and YouTube Gaming, which is owned by Google, are lagging far behind Twitch, but the gap between them is closing fast. Facebook hit an impressive milestone in the past quarter, with more than a billion hours of first-time viewing, nearly double the total viewership the platform garnered around this time last year.
“For the first time ever, we see that Facebook Gaming and YouTube Gaming are closely competing in terms of viewership,” said Ashray Urs, head of product StreamLabs in the report. “While the difference in viewership was about 1 billion hours last quarter, that difference narrowed to about 300 million hours in the first quarter. There’s a chance we’ll see Facebook Gaming overtake YouTube Gaming in viewership next quarter.
StreamLabs attributes much of that success to PUBG Mobile, Facebook Gaming’s most viewed game category in the past two years. Users watched 254 million hours PUBG Mobile live streams in Q1, an impressive 76% year-on-year increase. Facebook Gaming absorbs Microsoft’s failed live streaming platform Mixer last summer undoubtedly attracted a lot of new talent and viewers who migrated.
YouTube Gaming was the only platform of the big three to experience a dip in viewership this quarter, down 28.6% from 1.92 billion hours to 1.37 billion hours. Both the total number of hours streamed and the number of unique channels also decreased, but not by much (6.7% and 9.9%, respectively). However, given its year-over-year growth, YouTube Gaming doesn’t seem to be doing half badly as both the total viewership and the average concurrent viewership are up about 28%. The platform is also home to the most popular female streamer across all platforms: Valkyrae, whose content viewers watched for 12.2 million hours during Q1 this year.
We’ve reached out to Twitch, Google and Facebook for comment, and we’ll be sure to update this blog when we hear back.
All things considered, it seems that the live streaming platforms that are gaining attention during the pandemic are not waning anytime soon, even if lockdowns are lifted, vaccines are rolled out and people are moving out more regularly. But whether Facebook and YouTube’s live streaming services will ever pose a real threat to Twitch’s dominance in the industry remains to be seen.