Twitch’s dominance in the streaming world continues to slip as rival platforms Kick and YouTube are seeing significant growth in 2024, while Amazon-owned sites suffer a big dip.
For many years, Twitch was the undisputed industry leader in streaming, standing miles ahead of its competitors in viewership. While it’s still in first place, its commanding lead is slowly being chipped away.
According to a new report from Stream Hatchet, Twitch’s market share in hours watched across the top five platforms dropped a whopping 10% from Q2 2023 to Q2 2024.
This was a sharp decline, as the site went from having 70% of the hours watched across the streaming market to 60%.
While this is still 5.1B hours watched, YouTube and Kick are catching up. YouTube’s market share rose from 17% to 23.4%, while Kick is firmly in third place with 5.5%.
South Korean streaming sites AfreecaTV and Chzzk round out the top 5 with 3.4% and 2.1%, respectively.
Impressively, Kick saw considerable growth. Stream Hatchet reports the site saw a 163% year-over-year rise, thanks in large part to streamers like xQc spending most of their time on the platform.
Twitch’s viewership drop comes as the site continues to lose billions since being purchased by Amazon ten years ago.
According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, there is concern from staff that the struggling site will have another round of layoffs even after firing one-third of its employees at the start of 2024.
Insiders also warn that the site is becoming a “zombie” brand for Amazon, comparing it to book review app Goodreads and online discount store Woot.