Twitch isn't what it used to be

For many digital platforms, the health emergency and the various lockdowns caused by the coronavirus pandemic represented a watershed moment-"a before and after" within the industry. This is especially true for Twitch as well: suffice it to say that between 2020 and 2021 it saw an 82 percent increase in hours spent following live streams. At the same time, the number of active users and streamers on the platform increased. But with the end of the restrictions, the site has seen a drop in visitors, by nearly 10 percentage points - though they are still more than pre-pandemic. Today 31 million people a day access Twitch, and every hour on average there are 2.5 million active users.

How did Twich evolve in the last few years?

When Twitch was acquired by Amazon in 2014 (just three years after its founding), it accounted for 2 percent of Internet traffic, second only to Netflix, Google, and Apple. Despite these numbers and the approximately 7 million creators on the platform, weighing on the gradual loss of users-aside from the end of the pandemic-was increased competition in the streaming industry. In late 2022, for example, Kick was launched, a live streaming service that seems to be overtaking some of the critical issues for which Twitch is often blamed, such as intransigence in content moderation and monetization problems. Twitch prohibits all discriminatory terms and behavior, on pain of being banned from the platform (in some cases for life), while Kick is more flexible (perhaps too much so) when it comes to content moderation. The latter also retains only 5 percent of creators' revenue - Twitch, on the other hand, ten times as much. In June, Twitch had also tried to limit partnerships between streamers and brands, but its community did not like it and the amount of controversy that erupted caused the platform to step back – «these guidelines are bad for you and bad for Twitch and we remove them immediately» said the company. Kick is then investing to bring of its share some of the most popular streamers on Twitch: for example, this is the case of xQc (Canadian Félix Lengyel), who last June signed a roughly one hundred million dollar deal to leave Twitch in favor of Kick.

Twitch is no more Gen Z's television

According to many users, the golden age of Twitch would come to an end, due to - among other things - the success of the platform itself, which would bring it too close to the mainstream, taking away the experimental component that distinguished it. It was in this direction, for example, that Burberry chose to present its SS21 collection live on Twitch: «Burberry has always been a brand linked to innovation, and the collaboration with Twitch continues this legacy» Rod Manley, the brand's chief marketing officer, had said. The initiative gave users the opportunity to enjoy the fashion show from multiple perspectives and chat at the same time. Dior had done the same to launch its Fall 2021 Men's collection. In the tentative intentions of these brands was, among other things, to intercept a new audience, that of Generation Z. Twitch today, by contrast, is no longer just the equivalent of television for this particular segment of users, as it has often been described. Proof of this, for example, in Italy alone, is the success of BoboTv, launched by Christian Vieri with some ex-footballers and friends, which - discussing soccer in a very direct language - has managed to channel a more heterogeneous audience on Twitch, made up not only of very young people.

In this sense, it is reductive to think of the platform as an environment to follow streamers while they play eSports or do "just chatting": today the site is also used as a background while doing something else, and the direct relationship - made up of real interactions - between streamers and audience, the basis of Twitch's success, has become more subtle and perhaps less relevant. Moreover, continuous live streams have made the problem of burnout widespread on Twitch, and more and more streamers are stopping to protect their mental health-as, for example, did theMasseo (1.7 million subscribers) in October 2022. The ultimate proof that Twitch is changing and receiving less attention is the fact that, since the pandemic, the number of creators engaged in packaging and disseminating - on other social networks - compilations of the streamers' best, funniest, or most controversial scenes on the platform, which had become almost a genre unto itself, has also decreased.