Twitch: From Fornite to 2020

Before Twitter, politicians had almost no ability to talk directly with voters, outside of town halls and campaign rallies. Twitter broke down the walls and allowed politicians the opportunity to get their message out and interact with voters, for better or worse. It’s no surprise that candidates continue to push on social media and emerging platforms for new ways to get their message out and Twitch, the live streaming platform best known for gaming content, could be one of the most popular in 2020. But… why?

You might be surprised (like I was) to learn that, in the last three months, 2.7 billion hours of live content was streamed on Twitch — YouTube had 735 million hours — that’s a lot of gaming content. But Twitch offers more… For example: Twitch is airing Thursday Night Football each week and offering live commentary from their biggest influencers. You may also be surprised to learn that Twitch has more than 15 million daily active users and more than 726,000,000 hours are watched each month. And while most of those hours are surely consumed with e-sports and gaming, it’s quite the blue ocean for candidates looking to find new voters.

Which brings us to 2020.

Yesterday, President Donald Trump launched his Twitch channel. The channel, as of writing this, has only posted videos from his rally in Minnesota (offering the live stream, as well as highlights). The channel has nearly 50k followers already and tens of thousands of views. Senator Bernie Sanders created a Twitch channel in August and has used it to (mostly) post-campaign speeches — he has nearly 90k followers. Andrew Yang was the first presidential candidate to see the opportunity on Twitch, but has drawn less buzz (but kudos to his team for seeing the opportunity!).

Sure, streaming campaign speeches and rallies are fine, but how long until Trump decides to use Twitch instead of, say, talking to the press? Arguably, he’s already doing this to an extent on Twitter, but the power of live video + possible live interaction with viewers is massive. Most importantly, it allows these campaigns to reach a young and highly engaged audience, similar to what the Trump team did with Twitter and Facebook in 2016.

Trump won’t likely be the last candidate to launch their own Twitch channel — In fact, I’d guess whoever the nominee for the Democrats ends up being will surely have their own (even if not Bernie or Andrew Yang). Twitch is too big to ignore, especially if your opponent is using it in a strategic way. And as these major figures produce content for Twitch, we’ll see new users start using the platform… And they probably won’t be gamers.

Twitch isn’t the only new opportunity for candidates in 2020… I’ll write more about another outlet I’d be focusing on if I were running a campaign (*cough* podcasts *cough*).