Twitch 2016 retrospective: 292 billion minutes viewed

17 February 2017

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If there’s an award for best presentation of stats, Twitch wins hands down. 

The Amazon owned firm turned its 2016 retrospective into a game of sorts in which users take a journey by car through four notably different levels. Each presents stats and facts chucked out along the way complete with frustratingly catchy tunes and more. The most impressive stat has to be its headline 292 million minutes were watched on the platform in 2016.

In addition to this there were 2.2 million unique streamers and 14.2 billion chat messages sent. This gives a sense of both how large and how engaged the communities on the platform are. 

After you make it through the wasteland of level two, some more stats were revealed such as Finland being the ‘Most Friendly Country’ (Finns use the Friends feature the most), that there were over a million free Twitch Prime subscriptions (free if a user has an Amazon Prime account), and it gave a nod to features such as Whispers (153 million sent) which have helped to grow the community.

Twitch raised a highly commendable $25.3m (£20.2m) for charity in 2016 which is up over $8m (£6.3m) from 2015, 35,000 attended Twitchcon, and the retrospective also confirmed what most would have expected; Overwatch was the year’s most watched new game.

You can try it out for yourself here

Esports Insider says: As expected Twitch has seen considerable growth this year, with close to 50 billion minutes watched last year than in 2015. More importantly, whoever designed the presentation f the retrospective deserves a raise.