Twitch could be a $20B company within Amazon

The past several years has shown the social communities grow organically. But its hard to make users adopt one. If you build it, they probably won't come. It's easier for a big company to buy one up than start one from scratch. (Think Instagram versus Google Plus).

Second, Twitch is one of the few monetization models on the internet that is not pure ad based. Twitch does have ads, but streamers see more money through direct donations and monthly subscriptions. Also I am willing to bet the rate of ad blockers on Twitch is higher than the average site. Twitch has shied away from dark patterns that lock out adblocking users. I don't see any big modals or disabled video if I run an adblocker on Twitch. This is no doubt on purpose. So Twitch has locked on an monetization model of direct payment for digital content, which is rare on the internet. And best of all, it's completely optional.

A video streaming service alone is nothing revolutionary. There are many Twitch clones that haven't reach near the same popularity. Its the community, and how its funded.

I have a cable subscription as part of my apartment package - but I don't use it. I don't even have a TV. Internet and streaming only. I find that if I had TV I'd be much more passive and watch too much, now I watch SC2 but not as much as if I had TV. I spend a lot more time with edX and Coursera and watch lecture videos instead. If I had a TV it would be much harder to turn it off than a game stream. I like the smaller communities, watching a TV production I am much more of a passive anonymous consumer than even a (very big) 50,000 viewer stream on Twitch, and even though Twitch chat is notorious, at least it exists. And a lot of streamers and casters react to what is going on in chat at least sometimes, in traditional media I am much farther removed from the makers.

Of various streaming services I tried watching Twitch in the end provided the consistently best experience, these days up to 1080p60. That alone is not sufficient to know how much data is flowing though, the data rate can be very different even for streams with the same resolution and frame rate, so with the same advertised resolution one channel can be much more crisp than another one, but some people may experience occasional buffering issues.

I just checked, currently there are about 650,000 viewers total on Twitch, rough estimate just to get an idea of order of magnitude. More stats: https://www.quantcast.com/twitch.tv#trafficCard

You can change the period on the right, the earliest to set "From" to is 23 March, 2012, to get a view of how Twitch's viewers develop(ed) over time. When I look at the last 365 days it looks pretty flat. I'm not sure about the data though, for some reason the "Rest of the world" (other than USA) is pretty much gone from one day to the next beginning of 2016. Does anyone have an explanation? I doubt that the "rest of the world" stopped watching Twitch overnight.

Looking at https://stats.twitchapps.com/ it's the same result though - no real growth any more for at least the last 12 months. Unless that's based on the same data, I don't know.

https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=2014-08-25%202016...

Also, Highlights last forever