Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Twitch viewership has been way up since the pandemic started. Viewership grew to 5 billion hours watched between April and June, which is a huge increase no matter how you look at it: it’s up more than 50 percent from the first quarter of 2020, and it’s up more than 60 percent over the same three months in 2019. The metrics come from the latest streaming industry report by StreamElements and Arsenal.gg.
Last quarter’s report hinted that this increase was coming. In May, the companies reported a 45 percent leap in viewership for the whole live-streaming industry between just March and April. But this latest report shows that those large gains were sustained in the following months, even as people started having more flexibility to go…