Before this article appeared in the New Yorker, I confess to having never heard of Twitch (a streaming platform for e-sports). The following, momentum and dollars behind the platform speak to the rise of e-sports:
“Each month, a hundred million visitors watch their favorite personalities play video games on Twitch, spending an average of nearly two hours a day there. This audience is large enough to make the site one of the twenty most trafficked in the U.S., yet it’s perhaps more apt to measure Twitch against a different medium. With viewership numbers that rival those of MSNBC or CNN, Twitch is less like a conventional Web site than like a kaleidoscopic television network: thousands of channels at once, broadcasting live at every hour of the day.”
Per the article, top-performing players can earn $2 million a year. Some players require a $20,000 fee to simply demo a new game for a three-hour stream.
Amazon noticed and acquired the platform for $970 million in 2014.