When the wave of lockdowns struck the whole world as a result of the raging pandemic at the beginning of 2020, traditional sports got halted for the foreseeable future. It didn’t take long before Amazon-owned Twitch decided to leverage the situation and introduced a dedicated Sports category.
To secure its success, Twitch also announced collaborations with some of the world’s most famous football clubs, namely Real Madrid, Arsenal, Juventus and Paris Saint-Germain. Besides exclusive broadcasts from these teams, the category also includes official channels of sports leagues such as NBA, NHL, RFL, UFC and NWSL.
Last month, the Sports category on Twitch celebrated its first birthday. On this occasion, Streams Charts collected the category’s overall viewership statistics, month-over-month dynamics and the list of top channels to see how Twitch’s first venture into traditional sports worked out over the past year.
Viewership breakdown
Disclaimer: For these statistics, we used viewership data collected between 22nd July 2020 and 21st July 2021.
The statistics from the first year of Twitch Sports category existence show a notable viewership growth. In the first month, the category generated over 1M Hours Watched, while in July 2021, the amount of HW generated in the category surpassed 13M HW, marking a 1091.61% viewership growth in one year.
While the Sports category has seen a fairly steady rise in 2020, its growth started intensifying in March 2021, when the number of Hours Watched went up by 80% compared to the previous month. The following months were even more fruitful. In April 2021, the category crossed 10M Hours Watched for the first time, while in May 2021, it surpassed 15M HW.
The highest amount of Hours Watched in the category — 17M HW was generated during the 2020 UEFA European Football Championship in June 2021.
Since the launch of the Sports category last July, Twitch viewers spent in total 103M hours watching the sports content made by 65K Active Channels. On average, 89 channels within the category streamed concurrently.
The highest peak of 1.56M concurrent viewers was reached on May 26th, 2021 by Spanish streamer Ibai “Ibai” Llanos Garatea during his stream of La velada del Año — a series of boxing matches featuring Spanish streamers and content creators. Thanks to this stream, Ibai is now second in the top Twitch channels chart with the highest number of peak viewers.
Ibai also holds a record of the top streamer in the Sports category by all three metrics. Besides the highest peak, he also generated the highest amount of Hours Watched — 12.65M and has the highest number of Average Viewers watching his broadcasts — 130.5K AV. Furthermore, he was the top channel of months April, May and July 2021.
The second place occupies Brazilian creator Casimiro “casimito” Miguel, who generated 3.89M Hours Watched. The third is Gaules with 3.64M HW, followed by TrueGeordie with 3.35M HW and TROPS4 with 3.28M HW.
The channel with the highest Air Time in the category was the official Twitch sports channel TwitchSports, which broadcasted for more than 1K hours in the past year.
To determine the language distribution within the Sports category, we analysed the top ten languages by Hours Watched in the last two months (from June 1st to July 21st 2021), when Euro 2020 was ongoing.
Altogether, Spanish-speaking viewers contributed the highest portion of Hours Watched — 8.34M. It should be pointed out that Ibai’s broadcasts vastly impacted the result.
English-speaking spectators brought in 7.4M Hours Watched, placing second, while Portuguese-speaking viewers were just behind with 6.92M Hours Watched.
The rest of the languages in the top ten are German (2.218M HW), Italian (2.211M HW), French (1.82M HW), Russian (1.22M HW), Chinese (226K HW), Swedish (148K HW) and Korean (133M HW).
Is Twitch the future of live sports?
The presented statistics show that besides esports, Twitch is quickly becoming also a place for watching live sports. The growing trend is present and it is clear that the platform’s Sports category is set to continue developing.
Illustrating its commitment to the category, the platform recently unveiled its Sports Accelerator Program, which aims to help streamers who focus on “sports talk” streams and podcasts. Nevertheless, content creators still can be hit with live DMCA’s. This recently happened to a handful of them, including xQcOW and okharry, who got temporary bans for showing sporting events such as Tokyo Olympic Games or the Premier League matches.
Although the Twitch Sports category is growing exponentially, it seems unlikely that the platform will become the leader in traditional sports broadcasting anytime soon. Its main focus remains esports and gaming, which is reflected in the list of Twitch Top categories. Moreover, television networks maintain a firm grasp on live sports broadcasting and will not part easily with exclusive deals that represent their livelihood.
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