Streamlabs & Newzoo Q4 Year in Review Live Streaming Industry Report

Twitch Growth is Slowing; 46% More Content was Watched on YouTube Gaming Live last year; Mixer Doubles its User Base

In Q3, Ninja made the bombshell announcement that he will be streaming exclusively to Microsoft’s Mixer. It didn’t take long for others to follow suit. He was joined soon after by Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek. In November, Jack “CouRageJD” Dunlop announced that he would be streaming exclusively on YouTube Gaming Live, and Jeremy “Disguised Toast” Wang announced that he would be leaving Twitch to stream exclusively on Facebook Gaming. As we saw last quarter, Ninja’s move alone appeared to have a small impact on Twitch in Q3. In fact, the hours watched on the platform increased. However, this quarter it seems the culmination of many streamers moving platforms has had an effect on Twitch.

Points to Consider:

Twitch is still leading but experienced an overall decline in 2019.

The total hours watched on YouTube Gaming Live increased by 46% from Q1 to Q4 in 2019 and accounted for 27.6% market share in terms of hours watched for Q4, up 7% since last quarter.

Last quarter, YouTube Gaming Live was the only platform to see an increase in hours watched, streamed, and concurrent viewership.

Mixer more than doubled its number of hours watched and streamed when comparing 2019 to 2018.

Mixer has nearly the same number of unique channels streaming on the platform as Twitch. Mixer also has more than triple the number of unique channels compared to YouTube Gaming Live.

Riot Games was the most-watched publisher of 2019 across all platforms, beating Epic Games by 25.1 million hours

28.5% less Fortnite content was watched in 2019

Thanks to Newzoo for providing the data for Twitch, Mixer, and YouTube Gaming Live.

Please note: In January 2019, Newzoo implemented a change to its YouTube data collection methodology. They began collecting data from all live channels, instead of the top 100 channels for each game. What does this mean? Essentially, YouTube data from January 2019 onwards cannot be directly compared to viewership figures before January 2019. This change only applies to Newzoo’s YouTube methodology and has no impact on its viewing data for Twitch or Mixer.

Twitch

The streaming wars are heating up. We are starting to see how exclusivity deals from competitors are affecting Twitch, which is by far still the leader in terms of hours watched and streamed. However, Twitch lost some of its momentum in 2019.

Total Hours Watched in Q4