Will Twitch Ever Catch Up
Live streaming is a on going dream job for lots of creators and is growing every day. The question lots of new comers and viewers have is which platform they would prefer to watch streamers on or stream there content on. With there being three main streaming platforms creators and viewers have a lot of options on who they want to watch or post on.
The graph above shows the popularity over the past five years of the top three streaming platforms that Google Trends shows. Facebook didn’t start out as a live streaming platform but took over a recent live stream platform “Mixer” that recently was bought out by Facebook which created Facebook Gaming.
The chart doesn’t just show the live streaming popularity but the overall popularity of the platforms that offer it. Twitch is popular but not nearly as big as Facebook and YouTube being they have been around longer and have a lot more to offer other than just live streaming. Recently YouTube has evened out with Facebook on the who is being searched more online worldwide.
With YouTube around 2 billion users and Facebook approaching 3 billion users they are by far the biggest online platforms for media creation. Twitch has recently surpassed 15 million users which doesn’t come close to the usage of Facebook or YouTube. Twitch however has a popular fan base for creators and streamers because of the more select audiences. Most people who use Twitch aren’t just logging on one time and never going back. Most people use Twitch for find a streamer they like and become apart of a community and interact with the people on Twitch a lot more than Facebook and YouTube.
On YouTube it is more common to post per-recorded videos and not live stream even though it is growing. Majority of these platforms is the audience and users and a good amount is creators now but not nearly as much as the audience. Establishing a popular live stream account is extremely hard now with having more than a 100 popular established channels that have big audiences. That pushes away new creators and makes it hard for them to be seen with so many smaller creators with no community against all the big name streamers.
Facebook is new to streaming but is growing quite rapidly and has more of a select audience being there is a much larger audience on Facebook of all ages rather than Twitch and YouTube. Facebook has a lot more of the families and older community while Twitch’s community is focused solely on streaming and mostly gaming content along with YouTube's streaming platform.
The main point is to see how small Twitch is compared to other live streaming platforms but show how they still are making such a impact on certain communities in the live streaming world and the opportunities it has gave people to do something unique that they could not have the chance to do on live television or have it published anywhere else. These live streaming platforms are constantly growing and not going away anytime soon.
