Justin.tv’s gaming brand posts impressive growth

We’ve kept a slightly closer eye on gaming recently, which has put into our sight one of the hottest sectors of the industry, livestreaming.

Justin.tv, one of the Internet’s largest streaming services, has been focusing on providing gamers with tools that are tailored to their needs. To that end, the company built and released a separate brand called TwitchTV, apart from its larger Justin.tv aegis, for gaming.

We wondered when it launched it the investment would pay for itself. According to what its team has told us, it most certainly will. Recently, TwitchTV expanded its partner program to share revenue with a larger slice of its users. The company claims that the service remains marginally profitable, and is driving growth.

Essentially, TwitchTV can poach the biggest names in gaming by offering them cash flow. As professional gamers are not usually wealthy, this is enticing.

Today TwitchTV released a slew of new data that we picked over and found to be compelling enough to bring to you. We like TwitchTV because it is the confluence of an explosive genre, new technology, and new media. What follows are the core figures that TwitchTV released:

• The website served 8 million unique viewers (not visitors) in July.
• Also in July, TwitchTV distributed 1 billion minutes of gaming content, which works out to over two hours per viewer, per month.
• The site has doubled in size in the last five months, despite only being out of private beta for two.
• These figures make it, according to comScore, a top five gaming site.

Gaming, long the bastion of the quiet, is quickly growing into one of the most closely watched content varieties online. Individual gamers are building audiences that measure in the tens of thousands, and major events draw hundreds of thousands of viewers over their course. Dreamhack, in July, had 1.5 million viewers over a three-day period, making it more watched than a recent X Games.

We’ll continue to watch TwitchTV and the larger space. As money pours in and the audiences grows, livestreamed gaming content and esports itself are quickly becoming a force that cannot be ignored.