With Twitch still ahead, YouTube Gaming grows 25% in audience in December

With three giant platforms dominating the segment, with Twitch being the great leader, the game streaming market continues to rise and in December 2022, YouTube Gaming was the highlight, with a 25% growth in its monthly audience.

According to data published by the StreamElements website, YouTube Gaming was the only game streaming platform to show growth in the last month of 2022, reaching an audience of 305 million hours watched.

For YouTube Gaming, the month of December was the best performance of the last quarter of the year, even having a better result than the month of August 2022, one of the best of the year for the Google platform.

Despite the growth, YouTube Gaming is still the third largest game streaming platform today, behind Twitch, which leads by far, and Facebook Gaming.

Twitch’s growth during the COVID-19 pandemic

It’s not news that the live streaming segment has grown a lot during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the numbers can be impressive, especially those of Twitch.

According to the report published by the StreamElements website, Twitch more than doubled its audience in 2022, compared to 2019, before the pandemic.

Over the past year, Amazon’s streaming platform has surpassed the one billion hours watched mark every month, peaking in January at 2.059 billion hours watched.

“When you compare Twitch’s pre-pandemic numbers to its current hours watched, there is no question the platform has grown a lot even as its inflated pandemic-era numbers have trended downward. While Twitch remains dominant in the live gaming space, it’s too early to know if it will regain upward momentum or if other platforms like TikTok are impacting its growth,” said Gil Hirsch, CEO of StreamElements.

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