While many have complained about all the horrible things that happened during 2020, it definitely appears Twitch had a great year. The live-streaming site owned by Amazon managed to bring in more than 17 billion hours of viewership last year, which represents an 83% increase over the 9 billion viewers the platform had during the prior year in 2019 according to the latest reports from StreamElements and Arsenal.gg.

Some may attribute at least part of that growth to the ongoing pandemic and the fact that so many people are working or studying from home presently. Especially since Twitch, YouTube, and Facebook all experienced major jumps in viewership, but Twitch appears to be making the fastest gains and he gains appear to be accelerating themselves as more people are exposed to live streaming of esports and other Twitch topics. The momentum is obvious, as Twitch reached back-to-back milestones from October to December, increasing in viewership month over month and ending with a record high of 1.7B hours watched in the final month. Other platforms are seeing massive spikes, while other platforms continue to not be able to catch up or gain any audience whatsoever. People were already glued to their Facebook account and YouTube was already a dominant monopoly. Twitch on the other hand is the property that seems to be ascending now, and along with Zoom may end up being one of the two biggest “winners” of the entire pandemic era. 2021 early indications are that these trends will continue to gain velocity. On January 10^th 2021, a Spanish streamer and EU Heretics team owner David “TheGrefg” Martínez smashed the concurrent views record on Twitch with more than 2.5 million live viewers tuning in to watch him reveal his Icon series Fortnite skin. As the NFL, NBA, MLB and other live event competitors struggle with covid, empty arenas and cardboard cutouts of fans in the stands – Twitch put 2.5 million people in the seats LIVE online all at the same time for one single streamer.