Twitch kicked off 2026 with a strong surge, showing that the platform’s momentum is far from slowing down. Total hours watched have increased for the fourth month in a row, a trend that looks promising for both creators and audiences moving forward.
Still, despite a slight dip in peak viewership, January tells a story of decentralized success. More streamers than ever are building dedicated, niche audiences, gradually shifting Twitch away from reliance on a few massive “mega-events” toward a broader, more diverse ecosystem of consistently high-quality content.
With the esports season kicking off, League of Legends has returned to the platform’s top tier, while Counter-Strike is seeing a modest cooldown after the surge of hype generated by December’s Major.
In January 2026, Twitch generated a total of 1.529 billion Hours Watched, marking a roughly 6% month-over-month increase. Overall, Twitch continues to show positive momentum in this metric, with total watch time rising for the fourth consecutive month, a growth trend that has been ongoing since October 2025.
Streamer activity on Twitch saw a clear uptick in January. The number of Peak Channels grew by 16% month over month, while Average Channels increased by 10%. Overall, this mirrors the trend observed at the start of 2025, as streamers once again leveraged the New Year holiday period to capture the attention of viewers with extra free time.
Viewer numbers did see a modest increase overall. In January 2026, average viewership rose by 6%, while peak concurrent viewership fell by 8% month over month, compared to December.
So why does peak viewership continue to decline while average viewership is rising? The answer lies in increased competition among creators. Twitch now hosts a growing number of streamers producing distinct, high-quality content, giving viewers more choice than ever. As audiences spread their attention across many compelling streams, they are less likely to gather around a single broadcast, leading to lower peak concurrency despite overall growth.
The Action genre maintained its position at the top, generating around 890 million hours watched in January, a 10% increase month over month. Solid growth was also seen in Adventure (+12%), Open World (+20%), and Strategy (+18%). While there were no dramatic shifts in the rankings, Adventure moved ahead of RPG, and both Open World and Strategy surpassed the IRL genre in total watch time. By contrast, the MMO and Survival genres experienced a modest dip in January, with each seeing a 9% decline in total hours watched compared to the previous month.
Outside the top 10, MOBA delivered the strongest momentum, growing by 35% month over month and climbing to 14th place. Meanwhile, the Sports genre ranked 19th, recording a 26% increase compared to its previous performance.
In Twitch’s most-watched categories, Counter-Strike slipped four spots after an exceptionally strong December, which was boosted by the StarLadder Budapest Major 2025. Meanwhile, the kickoff of the competitive seasons for League of Legends and Valorant helped these games climb higher in the platform’s rankings.
World of Warcraft deserves a special mention — the iconic Blizzard MMORPG climbed several spots in January thanks to the Sauercrowd marathon. This is a major German World of Warcraft Classic Hardcore streaming event launched in late December 2025. Organized by top streamers Kevin “Papaplatte” Teller, and Maximilian “HandOfBlood” Knabe, it involves over 200 German-speaking content creators challenging themselves to reach max level and complete a raid, with a high risk of character deletion upon death.
TheBurntPeanut held onto his spot as the most-watched streamer of the month. In January, he racked up 11.3 million Hours Watched, a 29% increase from the previous month. True to form, most of his streams were in ARC Raiders.
British streamer Marc Robert “caedrel” Lamont made a strong comeback to the top 10 most-watched streamers, thanks to his League of Legends esports coverage. By actively streaming LEC and LCK matches, he amassed approximately 7.1 million Hours Watched.
On his streams, Caedrel puts a spotlight on his team, Los Ratones, which he co-founded. In 2026, Los Ratones earned an invitation to LEC Versus, where they now compete against some of Europe’s top teams.
The GamesDoneQuick also entered the top 10, thanks to its week-long Awesome Games Done Quick speedrun marathon in January. During the event, streamers from around the world came together to raise money for cancer research.
The only streamer in the top 10 to see a decline in hours watched compared to December was Japanese streamer Junichi “加藤純一うん〇ちゃん” Kato. His viewership dropped about 22%, causing him to fall four places in the rankings.
Сaedrel topped the charts for peak concurrent viewership on January 31, attracting 224,000 viewers at once during his stream of the LEC 2026 Versus match between Los Ratones and KOI.
Gianmarco “Tumblurr” Tocco attracted over 194,000 viewers while streaming the Italy vs. Brazil match at the Kings World Cup Nations 2026. Meanwhile, Nicholas “Jynxzi” Stewart’s most-popular stream was his show match against Wyatt “Musty” in Rocket League.
Read also: Brazil defends its title as Kings World Cup Nations 2026 final draws over 2.3M Peak Viewers
Several Russian-speaking streamers entered the top rankings thanks to their community casting of Counter-Strike tournaments, including BLAST Bounty Winter 2026 and IEM Kraków 2026.
The PrimeVideo channel earned a spot in the rankings with its stream of the NFL Wild Card game between the Green Bay Packers and Chicago Bears. Meanwhile, Dominik “MokrySuchar” Stokłosa channel drew a large audience for Złote Antosie 2025, a showcase event celebrating the top Polish content creators of the past year.
In the female streamer rankings, there were no major changes — Emily “Emiru” Schunk continues to lead. She kicked off the year with high activity, hosting several collaborative streams alongside creators like Brittany “Cinna” Watts, Emily “ExtraEmily” Zhang, and Jynxzi. On top of that, Emiru returned to gaming marathons, completing Red Dead Redemption 2 and beginning a Bioshock series.
It’s worth highlighting that in January, many female streamers were actively playing Hytale, the new title from Hypixel Studios that strongly resembles Minecraft. For instance, VTuber ironmouse logged dozens of hours in Hytale.
Read also: Behind Hytale’s Twitch peak: Top creators, sponsored streams and viewer demand
