Twitch

What can be learned from Twitch’s successful development: Know what you want, but also pay attention to what the audience wants.

Several content categories were established when Justin.tv was first founded in 2007 by Emmett Shear and Justin Kan, two recent Yale grads. The most popular category on the site by far was gaming, which expanded remarkably quickly. 

TwitchTV was launched in June 2011 after the company chose to separate its gaming content.

On June 6, 2011, a public beta test was officially launched. Since then, Twitch has averaged over 35 million unique visitors each month.

Twitch has received major venture capital funding, including US$15 million in 2012, and US$20 million in 2013.

The website received 45 million unique visitors in October 2013 and was ranked as the fourth-largest source of peak internet traffic in the US by February 2014. When Justin.tv was shut down in August 2014, the parent company was renamed Twitch Interactive to reflect the change in direction.

The same year Twitch was acquired by Amazon for US$970 million. Twitch acquired Curse LLC, an operator of online video game communities, in 2016.

In October 2020, it had 34.5 million monthly broadcasters and 30 million daily active users, with 2.5 million concurrent viewers on January 11, 2021.

Clancy took over as CEO of Twitch in March 2023 after Emmett Shear, the former CEO and co-founder of Justin.tv, announced his resignation after 16 years with the company. 

“In October 2006 we started working on live video for the internet. That became Twitch. More than 16 years later, I’m now a father and ready to move to my next phase of life. I wrote a blog post, but the short version is: thank you so much to everyone who built this with me.”

— Emmett Shear (@eshear) March 16, 2023

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