On February 27, Twitch will cease operations in South Korea. Following the official announcement at the end of last year, local streamers had 3 months to find a new service for their live broadcasts. Streams Charts analyzed how the dynamics of the Korean segment of Twitch changed during this time and how AfreecaTV and Naver's CHZZK metrics increased amid the departure of a key competitor.
According to Twitch's CEO, maintaining servers in South Korea costs 10 times more than in other regions due to South Korea's legislation allowing internet providers to charge higher fees to large foreign media companies for network usage. This is because these companies' products account for a significant portion of traffic and impose a considerable burden on servers. Twitch's management has tried various methods to reduce its expenses in the country, but they have been unable to fully resolve the issue.
The share of Korean broadcasts on Twitch from 2020 to 2023 accounted for about 5.5% of the total watch time of the platform. In terms of the number of channels, the Korean language ranked in the top 10 on Twitch. However, when Twitch management announced its departure from South Korea, the share of Korean language content began to steadily decline.
Before the departure announcement, Korean broadcasts on Twitch generated between 3M and 4.5M hours watched daily. After the announcement, a downward trend began: daily audience engagement for the Korean segment decreased, and it did not rise above 3M HW daily in 2024. Starting from February, this metric fell below 2M HW per day — and continues to decline. In percentage terms, the platform lost approximately 33% of watch time in the last 2.5 months.
Where are Korean Twitch streamers going?
One of the alternatives to Twitch is AfreecaTV, a popular streaming service in South Korea. Looking at the dynamics of this platform over the past month, one can indeed notice a trend of growth in terms of watch time. Before the announcement, AfreecaTV consistently accumulated 2-3M Hours Watched per day, and this figure has increasingly approached the 3.5M HW mark at the beginning of 2024 — an increase of about 16%. Since mid-January 2024, AfreecaTV's broadcasts have been generating more watch time than Korean broadcasts on Twitch. The number of unique channels on AfreecaTV has also increased, albeit slightly — by only 6%. Currently, the number of unique channels on AfreecaTV exceeds the number of Korean channels on Twitch.
AfreecaTV's metrics could have grown faster, but it faced competition from CHZZK, a new streaming platform from Naver. CHZZK had its full launch in January 2024 and has shown promising dynamics from the outset, garnering over a million viewing hours per day. Currently, CHZZK has nearly caught up with the Korean segment of Twitch by the metric. The number of unique channels on CHZZK is also gradually increasing and has already reached 3.7K channels per day.
CHZZK has attracted significant attention from popular Korean Twitch streamers: among them are lol_woolf, handongsuk, kimdduddi, and zilioner. All of them have transitioned from Twitch to CHZZK and are already building a decent audience on the new platform. While their metrics are still far from those they had on Twitch, there are trends indicating audience growth. For example, lol_woolf has already gathered almost 60K Peak Viewers on CHZZK, whereas his most popular stream on Twitch in 2023 attracted only 52.5K PV. The same applies to necklet880707, who has already gathered more Peak Viewers on CHZZK than he ever did on Twitch.
