Twitch Ate Everyone's Entertainment Lunch in 2013

When Shawn Plott, one of Starcraft’s best known and loved announcers and ambassadors, told me esports was “easily going to be eclipsing most forms of entertainment,” I thought he meant in the distant future. But if live-streaming site Twitch’s 2013 performance is any indication, the eclipse has already begun.

Twitch doubled its viewership over the last year and ended 2013 with more than 45 million unique viewers a month, who watched an average of 106 minutes of video a day, according to an end-of-year report from the company.

The report’s most evocative statistics pertain to Twitch’s expansion, either because that’s the only metric that San Francisco-based tech companies are interested in, or because with the newness of their business—being a live video streaming website—it’s hard to compare them to anything other than their own, previous year.

For points of comparison, you can look to other websites that are also providing videos to watch, even if they aren’t of the same exact nature as Twitch: Hulu attracts just 30 million viewers a month who watch for 50 minutes per day, according to analyst estimates. Netflix had 34.7 million unique viewers, but that includes people maintaining their physical DVD queues, and as of last year they had less than 30 million streaming subscribers.

Youtube, though, claims more than a billion unique visitors per month, but on average they were staying for just 15 minutes a day in 2012. That still adds up to six billion hours per month, so Youtube isn’t sweating it. Twitch is down at only 200 million hours of videos watched a month, but each individual Twitch viewer is sticking around the site much longer.

Conspicuously, Twitch doesn’t compare itself to other websites; it compares itself to television. On an average week, Twitch says it reaches more people than Breaking Bad, preseason football and Tosh.o combined. According to Polygon, 68 percent of Twitch viewers are watching less TV “to focus on game-based entertainment.” That seems to leave room for activities other than watching Twitch—like playing games, for instance—and it’s increasingly difficult to say what qualifies as “watching TV” now, anyway. It's not like television as a medium is in any danger yet—Americans are still watching over five hours of it every day.

Regardless, Twitch’s success last year is more evidence of the on-going ascendancy of esports, which remain Twitch’s bread and butter. League of Legends viewership rose by nearly 300 percent over 2012; Dota 2 viewership rose over 500 percent. The most watched esports tournament of the year, the August  LoL Season 3 World Championship attracted 32 million viewers, which is more than Game 7 of the NBA Finals.

So yeah, that eclipse is happening.