In 2025, a creator named Ibai Llanos hosted a boxing event called La Velada del Año V on Twitch and pulled in 9.3 million peak concurrent viewers. Not a single one of them was watching a video game.
The Amazon-owned platform is still tied in many minds to gaming, and gaming remains a pillar, with thousands of channels of live gameplay, e-sports tournaments and speedruns. But the habits of its audience have moved. “Just Chatting,” where a creator sits and talks to viewers, consistently leads the site in viewership. In plain terms, people come for games and stay for the conversation.
A bigger menu
Scroll the homepage today and you are as likely to land on a cooking class or a live concert as on a shooter. Dedicated categories cover IRL streaming from a phone, live music production and creative arts. Think of it like a cable lineup that began with one sports channel and kept adding rooms.
VTubers are the clearest sign of how far that has gone. These creators use digital, anime-inspired avatars that follow their real-time movements in place of a webcam, and they generated more than 1.1 billion hours watched in 2024, with strong momentum through 2025 and 2026.
Why the chat matters
The live video is only half the product. Viewers watch, then talk to each other in a chat room, with emotes such as Kappa for sarcasm and KEKW for laughter, and rewards like Channel Points that let them highlight a message or vote on Predictions. When a streamer pulls off something difficult, chat reacts at once. The practical upshot is a feeling of being in the room, and a survey of civic research cited by one guide found Twitch viewers more likely to trust influencers than users of traditional social platforms.
The scale is large. Industry data shows viewers consumed more than 20 billion hours of live content on Twitch in 2024. The market is crowded, though. YouTube offers better video playback, Kick targets looser moderation and Discord handles private friend groups, and many viewers follow creators across several sites.
Becoming a streamer is another matter. Starting takes a stable connection, streaming software and a way to capture video, but building an audience is hard, and turning it into full-time income is rare.
