Pandemic life continues to spur the livestreaming audience to new heights, with Twitch setting an all-time audience record in October, Facebook Gaming reporting significant overall growth, games such as Genshin Impact climbing the audience charts, and the Science & Technology category attracting more attention.
These findings come from the latest “State of the Stream” report from StreamElements, written with data from its analytics partner Arsenal.gg. StreamElements specializes in developing tools and services for the worldwide streamer community.
The biggest takeaway from the current data is that “Just Chatting” is here to stay. The category — a catch-all term for video logs, reality shows, unscripted programming, and streamers just hanging out with their audience — has grown rapidly over the last year, particularly as pandemic life has forced people all over the world into lockdown conditions. With a full 200 million hours watched on Twitch in October, Just Chatting is far and away the most popular category on the site, outstripping the gameplay-based content that Twitch is more typically known for.
Twitch itself hit a big milestone in October, spiking to more than 1.6 billion hours watched across the entirety of the site. This is a major bump over September’s viewership numbers with no particularly obvious core cause, but it represents an all-time high for Twitch. Facebook Gaming also enjoyed a 118% increase in its viewership for October, and continues an overall trend of growth from quarter to quarter.
One big winner in October was Hasan “HasanAbi” Piker, who cracked into the top 10 streamers on Twitch overall and scored the No. 1 spot in the Just Chatting category. Unusually for the platform, he did so with explicitly political content; Piker is a contributor to the Young Turks program, working alongside his uncle Cenk Uygur, and is known for his left-wing commentary.
Piker was one of the well-known streamers who played Among Us on Oct. 20 with New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and covered many major events in the U.S. presidential race live via his Twitch channel. As per a different report from StreamElements, of the several hundred thousand audience members who watched the Oct. 22 presidential debate live via Twitch, 34% of them tuned in via Piker’s channel. Piker would go on to command 75% of the Nov. 3 Election Day coverage on Twitch.
Another fast-growing section of Twitch is the Science & Technology category, which increased its year-to-year audience by 249% in October. The streamers in S&T typically pursue various projects live, such as tracking earthquakes, remotely feeding ducks and chickens via a webcam and a robot, or broadcasting the process of building machines, creating video games, or simply showing a peaceful multi-cam view of an aquarium full of fish.
The bizarre superstar of Science & Technology in October, though, was the California-based streamer Michael Reeves. Known for his YouTube channel where he builds a variety of objectively terrible devices, as well as his partnership in the social entertainment group OfflineTV, Reeves shot to Twitch fame/infamy in October due to a device he built which would broadcast vital information about his bathroom breaks to his audience via a custom overlay. He was, to put it delicately, streaming his stream, and apparently that’s the kind of thing that gets you just shy of 300,000 hours watched in a month. You can do anything you want in life, kids.
Changing the subject as fast as possible, video game content still made up much of the top 10 categories on Twitch in October. Among Us saw a significant drop in its audience share, which could be related to a spambot that made it almost unplayable for a while near the end of the month, but still commanded around 106 million hours watched and reached the No. 3 spot on Twitch overall.
Big newcomers included Phasmophobia, a four-player cooperative horror game about paranormal investigation by the UK-based studio Kinetic Games, which was the best-selling game on Steam for a while in mid-October, and Genshin Impact, a Chinese open-world fantasy game for PC, PlayStation 4, and mobile devices that premiered worldwide at the end of September.
While the news about its audience is generally rosy, Twitch has also been rocked by controversies in recent weeks, such as ongoing issues with copyright. According to an email sent by Twitch to streamers on its platform last week, the number of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notifications that Twitch received abruptly spiked in May, going from less than 50 per year to thousands per week.
A DMCA violation on Twitch usually comes from a streamer using unlicensed, copyrighted music during a broadcast. It’s never been uncommon to find clips or full archives of streams that have been partially or wholly muted due to a DMCA strike, but American music organizations like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) went into overdrive this summer, hitting thousands of archived videos on Twitch with copyright claims.
On Oct. 26, a letter was sent to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Twitch CEO Emmett Shear, claiming that Twitch “continues to turn a blind eye to the same users repeatedly violating the law while pocketing the proceeds of massive unlicensed uses of recorded music.” The letter, signed by multiple American professional music organizations such as the RIAA, SAG-AFTRA, and American Music Association, further accuses Twitch of failing to secure the appropriate licenses for the Soundtrack tool that it launched in October, which provides streamers with a library of licensed music to use during broadcasts.
In what proved to be a deeply unpopular move, Twitch reacted to the sudden flood of DMCA notifications by outright deleting many of the targeted videos, without giving affected streamers the chance to save the clips or offering any management tools for anything besides mass deletion. Even major streamers like Imane “Pokimane” Anys reported the sudden loss of years of archived video.
Twitch admitted in a Nov. 11 email to streamers that it had overreacted, and has promised to add more tools that allow streamers to manage their archives, as well as technology that will preemptively detect the use of copyrighted video. In the meantime, streamers on Twitch are encouraged to not play any music that they do not personally own the rights to, or have explicit permission to use.
