SBC News Voice of the Sports Betting Industry
The latest data released by Newzoo shows that 21.3% of all hours watched on Twitch from July to December 2015 was esports content.
This equals 475.5 million hours of esports content watched across all esports franchises, which is an average of over 79 million hours per month. 
It’s repeatedly noted how Twitch has hugely benefitted the growth of the esports scene in the West, though it is almost as repeatedly overlooked how this is a two way relationship. Esports have played a key role in helping Twitch grow to the huge live video platform it is today.
An analysis of viewing hours per franchise reveals that the share of esports content compared to game content streamed by consumers varies widely from 12.7% for Hearthstone to 51.9% for Dota 2.
The importance of esports for Twitch is reflected in its continued partnerships with publishers who are growing their franchises as esports titles. The latest of these partnerships include Psyonix’s Rocket League and Super Evil MegaCorp’s mobile MOBA Vainglory. The latter also received a multi-million dollar investment from Twitch itself.
This report also highlights how MOBAs (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) represent an incredible 58% of esports hours watched on Twitch. This is mostly due to the popularity of League of Legends and Dota 2. Adding the Shooters genre into the mix, mostly Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, this increases to a total of 85% of watched content in the latter part of the year.
This kind of information is doubtless of significant interest to potential sponsors as an increasing number of non-endemic companies look to move into the esports space in 2016.
