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In its first quarterly streaming industry report since top Twitch streamer Tyler “Ninja” Blevins signed an exclusive deal with Microsoft’s Mixer, Streamlabs and Newzoo report that the platform has nearly tripled the number of hours streamed and doubled its channel count.
32.6 million gaming hours were streamed on Mixer in the third quarter of 2019, an 188% increase over the 11.3 million hours streamed in Q2. Those hours were spread over 3.9 million unique channels in Q3, compared to 1.95 million in Q2. The report speculated that Ninja’s move encouraged other streamers to follow him in migrating to Mixer.
However, not all of the news is good for the platform. Viewers spent an all-time high of 100.9 million hours watching gaming streams on Mixer in Q2 of 2019, but that number dipped 10.6% to 90.2 million hours in Q3. Still, the service’s annual viewership has nearly doubled. Average consecutive viewers dropped 11.7% to 40,800, while the average viewers per channel declined from 8.9 to 2.7. Both changes can be ascribed to the spike in new channels.
Mixer’s gains are unsurprisingly coming at Twitch’s expense. Its channel count had already been in steady decline since the start of 2019 and dropped another 19% in Q3 to finish at 3.77 million. Part of the decline can be directly attributed to the service’s reliance on Fortnite, which has been experiencing steady drops in viewership since Q2 of 2018. Epic Games lost its spot as the publisher behind the most-watched streaming titles last quarter for the first time since mid-2018 and has since fallen behind Blizzard Entertainment, Riot Games and Valve. Blizzard’s fortunes were driven by the highly successful August release of World of Warcraft Classic.
Some other negative trends for Twitch seem to be ending, with total hours streamed rising from 87.3 million to 89.6 million in Q3 after previously dropping 10% in Q2. Average viewers per channel and concurrent viewers also increased slightly in Q3, settling at 28.2 and 1.16 million, respectively.
