9.5 million new streamers hit “Go live” on Twitch this year

While Twitch lost some market share this year to competitors like YouTube and Kick, it’s still far and away the most popular streaming platform. In Q3, it was home to a whopping 85% of unique streaming channels—meaning that if someone went live during those three months, chances are Twitch was their home platform.

And Twitch’s annual Recap, which just debuted to a more positive community reception than some other hugely anticipated annual wrap-ups, includes data showing that new streamers continue to choose it as the place where they hit “Go Live.”

According to Twitch, 9.51 million new streamers broadcasted on its platform for the first time in 2024. To put that in context, Twitch on average saw 7.3 million individual streamers go live per month throughout the year, per Twitch Tracker. Clearly, not all those first-time streamers have continued on to be regular broadcasters, but the data available doesn’t tell us how many of them added to Twitch’s long-term creator pool.

And, unfortunately, we can’t compare this year’s gain in new streamers to 2023’s, because Twitch structured its recap data differently last year. Instead of saying how many new streamers started broadcasting, it highlighted the number of streamers who joined its affiliate program throughout the year (502,000), and how many streamers became Partners (6,363). This year, we don’t have a breakdown of which streamers became monetized—we just know that 9.51 million gave streaming the ol’ college try.

As for why all those millions of potential creators chose Twitch as their home, aside from it being the most prominent name in streaming, it made mainstream news numerous times this year thanks to creators like Kai Cenat and Ironmouse (pictured above) hosting record-setting, celebrity-filled marathon streams that generated money for charities.

Twitch gave a nod to both creators in its recap:

• It crowned Ironmouse its “cringe demon queen” and credited her with being one of the reasons 2024 was “VTubing’s biggest year yet.” It also put her on a billboard in Times Square to celebrate. Fancy!
• Cenat got not one, not two, but three shout-outs: First for his McDonald’s partnership promo’ing the new Chicken Big Mac; then for his June sleepover stream with Kevin Hart and Druski, which peaked at 713,000 concurrent viewers; and finally for his most recent subathon, where he became the platform’s most-subscribed-to creator, with 727,000 active subs.

As for how much content Cenat, Ironmouse, and the millions of other streamers on Twitch put out this year, the platform said there were nearly 880 million hours streamed and 20 billion hours watched.

Twitch’s most popular categories of content for 2024 included games like Grand Theft Auto V and Valorant, but also Just Chatting, Sports, and Special Events (things like subathons and charity streams; broadcasters also use it to tag things like IRL streams where they go to concerts or fairs, and react streams where they watch things like the Olympics with their viewers).

The platform also cited a growing culture of chillification: “chill” was the #1 tag streamers used to label their broadcasts, viewers watched 100.6 million hours of ASMR streams, and “cozy” games like Stardew Valley grew to nearly 24 million hours watched.

Twitch didn’t give any official predictions for what might happen in 2025–but based on this data and the overall growth of the $250 billion creator economy, we expect we’ll see a few million more people give streaming a shot.