eMarketer estimates Twitch will have 37.5M monthly active viewers in the US this year and is on pace to surpass the 44M mark by 2022
Context & Ripple Effects
eMarketer's projection extends a growth curve Twitch has been on for years: the service had already doubled to 100M unique viewers worldwide by December 2014 and drew 21M uniques during E3 2015, so a 37.5M US-only monthly figure reads less like a spike than a continuation.
The forecast also matters because watch-time data keeps confirming it — Twitch went on to post 5B hours watched in Q2 2020, up 62.7% quarter over quarter — and because Twitch is now the engine behind Amazon's ad-supported streaming reach of more than 120M monthly users.
First-order effects
- Advertisers gain a measurably larger US Twitch audience to buy against, with eMarketer putting monthly active viewers at 37.5M this year and past 44M by 2022.
Second-order effects
- YouTube Gaming and Facebook Gaming are forced to compete on watch time rather than just presence — their Q2 2020 gains (1.5B and 822M hours respectively) show rivals scaling alongside Twitch rather than ceding the category.
Third-order effects
- If the trajectory holds, live game streaming becomes a core pillar of Amazon's advertising business, with Twitch's US audience growth directly feeding the ad-supported reach Amazon reports monthly.
The trend: US live game streaming is maturing into a mainstream advertising medium, with Twitch setting the pace while YouTube Gaming and Facebook Gaming narrow the watch-time gap.