Twitch Viewers Watched 9.36 Billion Hours of Content Last Year

Humanity has peaked: in 2018, Twitch viewers watched a wildily impressive 9.36 billion hours of content. In one year.

According to a new report from StreamElements, a company that creates tech for streamers, both Twitch and YouTube Gaming had impressive years in terms of viewership. More specifically, the report reveals that 9.36 billion hours of content was consumed on Twitch in 2018, which is a hefty 25 percent increase over 2017.

To put that number into perspective, that's over one million years of streaming content watched. It only takes about 25,000 years to get the closest galaxy. With one million years, we could go to said galaxy 40 times.

Meanwhile, YouTube Gaming's live content racked up 2.3 billion hours in 2018, which is about 25 percent what the Amazon-owned company, and its biggest competitor, put up. However, YouTube Gaming saw much more growth year-on-year, with an increase of 104 percent.

Meanwhile, the newest player in the space, Mixer from Microsoft, only came in at 167.96 million hours, which is substantially less than YouTube and Twitch, but a 179 percent increase from 2017.

The report also reveals what games were viewed the most in 2018. And of course Fortnite is at the top.

Interestingly, Fortnite's viewership is actually finally on a decline, which may be a sign the game is finally starting to slow down in general. According to StreamElements, it peaked during the second quarter of 2018 with about 400 million hours. And this makes sense, this is about when the game's popularity seemingly peaked as well.

That said, as you can see, it still is comfortably ahead of every other game, with only one title -- League of Legends -- even with any type of touching distance.

Looking at that list, it's pretty crazy to see almost no new games represented, which I guess just goes to show how hard it is to make a streaming-friendly, mega games as a service title.

It will be interesting to see what 2019 has in store. It doesn't look like there will be anything releasing this year that could knock Fortnite off its perch. In fact, I'm not sure if there is any 2019 release that will even hit top 10. Maybe Red Dead Redemption 2 if Red Dead Online takes off?

Anyway, as always, feel free to leave a comment letting us know what you think. Will any game released this year become a huge streaming hit?

Thanks, VentureBeat.