It’s been about two months since Twitch went dark in South Korea, and some compelling alternatives have emerged. Homegrown streaming platforms, such as Naver‘s CHZZK and AfreecaTV‘s SOOP, have seen increased attention among Korean gamers since the start of 2024.
Last December, Amazon-owned Twitch announced that it would back out of the Korean market, citing its “prohibitively expensive” operational costs in that region. The move became official in February 2024, when the Korean Communications Commission also slapped Twitch with a fine.
Two months later, StreamElements has taken an early look at the Twitch alternatives that are serving Korean creators. The streaming platform teamed with data provider Streams Charts to examine viewership trends on CHZZK and SOOP, both of which are pulling in millions of hours of monthly watch time.
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When Twitch announced its Korean withdrawal, AfreecaTV already had a presence among Korean gamers thanks to its activity in the esports world. In terms of hours watched, SOOP led all streaming hubs in Korea over the first three months of 2024. In March, it recorded 98 million hours of watch time as Twitch’s audience shrank to just a fraction of its pre-withdrawal highs.
The above chart shows that CHZZK, which entered an open beta last December, has come on strong since Twitch made its controversial decision to move out of Korea. The Naver-owned hub saw its watch time more than double between January and March of this year, and its channel numbers are trending upwards as well. In Korea, there are now more active channels on CHZZK than on either of its main competitors — even though it only counted about 5,000 hubs at the start of the year.
This data isn’t just relevant to Korea; it could also have ramifications for the global streaming industry. StreamElements Co-Founder Or Perry explained that both CHZZK and SOOP are courting English-speaking users.
“This past year, the discourse on livestreaming platforms has been rooted in Twitch, YouTube, and Kick as content creators weigh options for reaching the broadest audience,” Perry said in a statement. “In South Korea, AfreecaTV’s SOOP and Naver’s CHZZK are two other players who might join the conversation. Both platforms are working on global launches this year featuring English-language accessibility, with CHZZK currently in beta and SOOP’s beta announced for the first half of 2024.”
The streaming trends on CHZZK and SOOP certainly seem to match the “meta” on other platforms. Just Chatting is one of the two most-popular categories across all of Korea’s major streaming hubs. That genre also ranked as Twitch’s most-watched category in 2023.
