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262 Billion Minutes Of Video Were Watched On Twitch In 2016

Here at [a]listdaily, you might say that we “nerd out” a little at the possibility of statistics, but for everyone else, Twitch has made its 2016 retrospective a bit more fun. A “freak sandstorm” has scattered the site’s year-end report across four video game worlds. To access them, users can traverse these worlds in a virtual car, learning tidbits of information along the way—like which games were the most popular and the trends that popped up throughout the year.

Pokémon GO, for example, became the first mobile game to top the Twitch charts. “It was a short but memorable stay,” notes the game. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) held its position as the most-viewed first-person shooter last year and the most-viewed new game was by far Activision Blizzard’s Overwatch.

TwitchCon entertained over 35,000 attendees last year, and 10,348 people downloaded the official TwitchCon app.

An amazing 262 billion minutes of video were watched on Twitch last year across 2.2 million unique streamers. The most popular clip? This one, of streamer Avaail playing Pokémon GOThe site saw more than a million free channel subscriptions through the year. Anyone who’s viewed a livestream on Twitch knows that the chat box is the major hub for audiences to provide feedback and talk among themselves. 2016 saw a total 14.2 billion chat messages sent and that includes chats that affect gameplay—Automod features are currently active in nearly 10 percent of all chats, Twitch reported. The most used emote (Twitch emoticon) at 413 million times was “Kappa”—the face of then Justin.tv employee, Josh DeSeno commonly used to infer sarcasm.

Beginning last summer, fans could “cheer” for their favorite streamers by purchasing Bits—special emoji used in the chat room that can also be used with hashtags to raise funds for various causes. Twitch reports that last year, 590 million total bits were cheered and generous viewers raised a total of $25.3 million through the site.