Twitch.tv Continues to Skyrocket with 45 Million Unique Monthly Viewers in 2013

By: Michael J. Poropat - Brought to you by CompetitiveGamer.net

Today, Twitch.tv released its 2013 year statistics and the numbers were nothing short of mind-blowing. Twitch.tv announced that it had an average of 45 million unique monthly viewers with an average of 540,000 concurrent viewers during prime time hours. That was more prime time viewers than AMC, TNT, SciFi and MTV. Twitch also reached more viewers per week than Breaking Bad, the NFL Preseason and Tosh.0 combined.

These numbers are more than double the numbers from 2012 (about 20 million unique monthly viewers in 2012) and the increase comes off a huge year in eSports despite Major League Gaming leaving Twitch.tv to use their own broadcasting site. League of Legends, of course, was the most watched video game on Twitch.tv but its “rival” game DotA 2 increased in viewership by over 500% since 2012. DotA 2, which was published by Valve, has seen major success and nearly every eSports team has expanded into DotA 2. While StarCraft may have been the boom of eSports when it was released, its popularity has decreased and has plateaued just behind LoL and DotA 2. After that, many of the First Person Shooters like Call of Duty.

Beyond all of that, the most impressive and telling statistic is that of people who watch Twitch.tv, 78% of them are are between the key demographic age of 18 and 49, 58% of send more than 20 hours per week watching twitch and 68% of them have reportedly decreased their TV watching time to watch more game-related content.

The fact that users are watching less television is a telling trend. As eSports has emerged coinciding with the boom of streaming and Twitch.tv specifically, TV has been less and less utilized. A large reason is because TV stations have moved a large majority of their content online, including ABC, CBS and FOX, the big three in TV. Another factor, however, is simply the new generation. As technology advances, more and more of our lives will be spent on the internet. It has gotten to a point where TV is almost too slow to be breaking news and the internet is where most people now get their news.

I’ve been asked many times when eSports will be featured on prime time television and my answer is always the same: it won’t. And that’s not because it will never be big enough-it already is big enough. The reason is because the industry works better over the internet and the entire industry is tailored to be perfect for online streaming. These number prove my point. Internet streaming is clearly the TV of the future and it’s only a matter of time before the NFL, NBA, NHL and all the other major sports start streaming their content live and exclusively online and when it does, we will be able to see how it really matches up with eSports.

Check out Twitch.tv’s full report below:

Twitch retrospective