Today, StreamElements and its partner, analyst Rainmaker.gg, published the February edition of their report “State of the Stream”. It is a fascinating document because, as the end of the pandemic approaches, it is further proof that the live broadcast platforms were one of the winners of the crisis. (You know, assuming there may be winners for a global mass death event.)
The biggest finding in this month’s report is that, in terms of hours watched, both Twitch and Facebook Gaming have increased by about 80% year over year. To be a little more specific: Twitch grew by 82%, while Facebook Gaming grew by 79%. For Twitch, that translates to over 1.8 billion hours of viewing in February; Facebook Gaming, on the other hand, made up for 400 million hours. (For reference: in March 2020, when the pandemic was starting, Twitch canceled 1.1 billion hours of viewing. And by April, Facebook Gaming had exceeded 291 million hours watched.)
These numbers are huge and, I think, durable: both numbers are actually a decrease from January, which was a month longer. To me, this suggests that the total number of people watching live streams has increased significantly during the course of the global coronavirus pandemic.
That said: these figures do not reflect the launch of ongoing vaccines – which in the United States have only recently started to increase exponentially. I will be interested to see if the numbers decrease as the world returns to some appearance of normalcy. Even if they do, in this hellish season of our lives has pulled the live broadcast as a practice firmly into the mainstream.