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Twitch saw a 100% YoY growth in viewership in January 2021

New analytics from StreamElements and Rainmaker.gg show a boom in popularity for Twitch over the last year.

Donovan Erskine

February 16, 2021 9:15 AM

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It’s no surprise that livestreaming and VoD saw massive spikes in popularity last year as many turned to the internet for entertainment during extended periods of lockdown. Twitch specifically saw a huge boost in numbers throughout 2020, and now we’ve got some exact numbers. Twitch’s viewership was up over 100% year-over-year in January 2021.

This news comes by way of StreamElements's latest State of the Stream report alongside data from its analytics partner Rainmaker.gg. In January 2020, Twitch saw a total of 941 million hours watched. In January 2021, that number was over 2 billion. Of course Twitch was already a supremely popular platform that was only getting bigger as time went on, but the ongoing pandemic was a leading cause of the spike in viewership.

If you look at the graph above, you can see that it was in March, when the pandemic became a massive issue in the United States, that Twitch’s viewership skyrocketed, nearly doubling the previous months’ numbers. This is when we saw schools, offices, and jobs shut down in order to avoid unnecessary spread of COVID-19. While being forced to shelter in place, many turned to Twitch. We see another jump in October 2020 and in January 2021, where viewership hours surpassed 2 billion.

Outside of viewership hours, the report from StreamElements and Rainmaker.gg also breaks down other aspects of the Twitch platform. Rust was the second most popular category, as many of the top streamers flocked to the survival game in early January. The list of the top 10 streamers last month features creators from across the globe, including TheGrefg, who just recently broke concurrent viewership records.

It’ll be interesting to see how these numbers change over the next several months, as the course of the pandemic is still fairly unpredictable. For more on Twitch, StreamElements, and Rainmaker.gg, stick with us on Shacknews.

Donovan Erskine

News Editor

Donovan is a young journalist from Maryland, who likes to game. His oldest gaming memory is playing Pajama Sam on his mom's desktop during weekends. Pokémon Emerald, Halo 2, and the original Star Wars Battlefront 2 were some of the most influential titles in awakening his love for video games. After interning for Shacknews throughout college, Donovan graduated from Bowie State University in 2020 with a major in broadcast journalism and joined the team full-time. He is a huge Scream nerd and film fanatic that will talk with you about movies and games all day. You can follow him on twitter @Donimals_