Twitch has always been at the top of the live content game, with huge amounts of viewers over the last few years through events, collaborations, reveals, and the overall notoriety of the platform allowing it to reign supreme over the game for the better part of the decade.
But questions have arisen with new statistics showing a slow decline of viewership for Twitch and an incline for YouTube Gaming and Facebook Gaming live streams. People are also wondering why Mixer is just not able to compete in the live content market, with only 3.2% of Twitch’s viewership in December of 2019, compared to YouTube’s 37.5% and Facebook’s 22.7% of Twitch’s viewership in the same month.
These statistics are pretty well aligned with what the gaming community belives in March of 2020, which is generally no surprise as not much can change in 3 months, but what is a surprise is just how little those 27.6 million Mixer viewers are represented in the wider gaming community. Through comments on a poll run on our Twitter, the main reason people aren’t using the smaller (Take this lightly as Facebook and Mixer are still huge platforms but in comparison to the top of the streaming platforms) platforms is either due to UI or just lack of variety on the platform.
The mixer situation has left a lot of people scratching their heads as they have (in my opinion) a really nice UI compared to the other platforms, paid for HUGE streamers such as Ninja, Ewok and Shroud to stream exclusively on their platform, child company to a huge company (Microsoft), and have a nice aspect of discovery for newer streamers on the platform. Surely this is a recipe for a successful streaming platform? That’s just not the case for Mixer. We saw a huge spike in viewership for the platform through the announcement of Ninja moving to the platform, but it just seems that they can’t retain viewership like Twitch and even YouTube can.
Mixer, backed by Microsoft has a huge budget when it comes to transferring streamers from other platforms over to their own in hopes of creating a successful streaming service. It has been estimated by Twitch Streamer, Sebastian “Forsen” Fors to be at around $6-8 million per year on a 3-year contract. This was based off an educated guess through his experience as a large streamer and former professional Hearthstone and Starcraft player.
Only today, we saw Dr Disrespect come out with an announcement saying that he will continue to stream on Twitch, and only on Twitch. We can only assume that a contract has been signed between the Doc and the platform to have Dr Disrepsect stream exclusively. This is most likely due to the drop of 2 of Twitch’s biggest streamers, Ninja & Shroud moving to Mixer and more to come.
Comparing statistics on analytics tracker, Social Blade, we can get a rough idea of the viewership between platforms. Comparing each platform’s top 10, we can see Mixer sitting at a top follower count of 2.9m with Ninja, and Twitch, with 14.7m, as well with Ninja.
This doesn’t mean that Mixer is failing by any means, as Twitch has been around for the better part of a decade, making Mixer still a newbie in the live streaming game, but it really raises questions on what viewers want to see on a platform, and it just seems that their favourite streamer doesn’t really impact the way people view live streams.
On the goto.game twitter, a poll was made asking out of these main viewing platforms, which was their go-to the platform, and it was accurate to the data collected last year, with Twitch still being the viewers favourite for a plethora of reasons, and Facebook & Mixer being the bottom 2, as predicted.
So, at the end of the day, we can only expect Twitch to continue to reign as number one over the rest of the Live Streaming market. But, if this drop does manage to continue and drop enough to hit numbers as low as the 3 behind it, we may see an evolution to how streaming platforms hold themselves, whether the implementation of media sharing tools are put in place, like YouTubes, or a higher social media presence, like Facebook has, we may even see big platforms such as Twitter putting their two cents in and creating a platform of their own.
