How Twitch Is Helping Businesses Build Strong Communities

right it's again not just a lean back i want to watch content but they want to make that connection um they want to com they want to connect with people who have similar interests and so when you watch a lot of streams um especially those that have been growing over time it's really kind of the same group of people it's almost like a group of friends coming and enjoying talking with each other on chat but also talking with the content creators and i think that's why they want that passion they want that community they want that sort of being with like-minded people it's almost like they're watching content or enjoying an experience with their squad you got your perspective i just want to be happy don't you we have mike aragon who is the senior vice president at content at twitch mike i'm bummed that you can't visit our office because gary's got a really cool twitch studio outside his office mike oversees the company's global broadcaster partnerships esports twitch studios content development and marketing uh prior to being at twitch he was at elation and playstation during his eight years at sony he managed playstations network digital video music and content services and for consumers in more than 30 countries i'm sure dubai or hailed from was one of them mike welcome to the show and uh you know great to see twitch and everything it's doing in the industry we're excited to have you on today yeah thanks so much for having me i appreciate it so mike i think um you know it's probably for the audience that's watching uh twitch is a brand that they've heard of at this point or you know but may not know as much so why don't we just start with the hardcore twitch 101 i just want to make sure we ground everybody even though it's one of the leading brands and platforms in the space and thank you for being on brother yeah no

thanks again good to see you gary um well yeah back in 2017 when i joined twitch uh it was i had to certainly explain to a lot of people what twitch was especially my mom and my dad i didn't quite get it today we are a lot more mainstream but i do think that there's still some folks who you know i've heard about it or kids have heard about it um or they've heard about it through their kids but at twitch we describe ourselves as a leading service and community for multi-player entertainment and the way we describe multi-player entertainment really is about live interactive video and then the shared experiences that happen with the community and millions of people around the world so you know the way we think about twitch is it's not a lean back experience we're just kind of leaning back and consuming content it really is a lean forward experience whether you're leaning in and engaging with a community around your favorite game streamer or you're watching thursday night football with your favorite fans or your favorite streamer um but it's that leaning experience that really happens because people are uh watching content and sharing this passion with other people uh that have similar tastes um they do this a lot um in chat on twitch so chat is the conduit that connects the content creators and the content and the fans and you know a lot of other services obviously have chat as well i think that the difference on twitch though is there really is a dialogue that happens between the community each other and also the community and the fans and so it's that so we really see ourselves as a video platform but it really is a community that brings people together um you know twitch right now we are mostly game content so people watching other people play video games or watching esports uh but if you think about the mechanism for people wanting live content having those real-time interactive experiences that gaming provides it really has started to extend into a lot of new categories sports music or big ones just chatting which gary i noticed that you were uh streaming the other day and just chatting is uh you know when i got here it was almost non-existent in four years it's now definitely a top two sometimes it's not the number one category but it's just a huge category of people like you streaming your passion or you know we've got people doing talk shows um all kinds of different things uh that communities are interested in um and that has been a part of twitch that has been growing and it's been quite phenomenal to see you know actually you touched on where i wanted to go but i want you to expand on like why do you think people are watching twitch like what's like what are some of the themes and go a little bit deeper on them

yeah well i think you know especially today uh in this world where people are still sheltering in place but even before that you know what we have found is that twitch is a place where people want to connect with the community right it's again not just a lean back i want to watch content but they want to make that connection um they want to com they want to connect with people who have similar interests and so when you watch a lot of streams um especially those that have been growing over time it's really kind of the same group of people it's almost like a group of friends coming and enjoying talking with each other on chat but also talking with the content creators and i think that's why they want that passion they want that community they want that sort of being with like-minded people it's almost like they're watching content or enjoying an experience with their squad we sort of think of it as like virtual party like people are on they just want to go hang out with somebody and that's kind of the experience then we also have another subset of folks who just love watching people do what they do the best in the world you know my daughter got a 17 year old daughter who plays soccer and she loves to watch rose level soccer videos and leo messi videos and some people who just want to watch shroud one of the best gamers in the world just do his thing and see how this guy is so amazing um because he is and these some of these folks are just the best in their world and others are just funny and entertaining and others are you know they have so they've got all kinds of different people we've got the high skilled gamers we've got the gamers who just have a great personality and build community and then we got some folks who just want to learn from the best um but it really is about that community and the connection with each other that makes twitch very unique in everything that we do actually michael from my for my own curiosity what were you doing right before twitch and what kind of like triggered you to make the jump i'm just there's a lot of executives watching right now and i think you might be able to help them with that and i think that might be an interesting question yeah so to take a little bit of a step back when i was um so you know i born and raised in albuquerque new mexico spent all my life there um you know my parents were you know my dad worked for the phone company middle grade middle class family um but you know didn't have a ton of perspective out outside of you know albuquerque we had traveled a bit and my first job was at intel and um because intel at the time in albuquerque was a huge manufacturing facility i went and worked there and kind of got into the tech space first um but decided you know that wasn't quite my thing i wanted to go get my mba and when i was coming out of my mba got in the digi i worked for uh booz allen at the time had a big communication media technology firm michael wolff who i'm sure you've heard of was an offer partner and worked for him because they wanted they were at the time the sales pitch was the convergence of media and technology so i worked with him on a and other partners on a bunch of you know projects in that space where media companies were starting to think about digital and what the impact was going to be we decided to move out in new york when we had our twins and just said hey we want to live a little bit closer to albuquerque and or home and that ended up being los angeles and worked at a studio for a bit at sony pictures and helped them with a lot of their initial digital transformation because this is 2004 2005 and you know the studios were trying to figure this out um right around that time playstation 2 had was uh sort of you know they were deprecating playstation 2 launching playstation 3 and one of the big gaps was we didn't have a very good platform a playstation platform and so they hired a whole group of us to go think about what's the business model for playstation network and how do we build experiences digital experiences for games and online games and community playing but also other things like media and so i went and i did that for a few years and that's how i got into gaming got it but my role at playstation was really about gaming is at our core but like what are other adjacent things that gamers want to do they want to watch netflix movies they want to listen to music and so my job is running those services and really thinking about the adjacent interests of a gamer and bringing that to playstation and that helped playstation 4 get back to where it was which was number one and at the time i had uh met peter chernin and his crew and decided to to do a stint in the sort of the startup world and one of the things that peter was trying to do is they had bought a an asset called country roll which i'm sure you're familiar with back in 2015-ish you know and crunchyroll's still quite popular it's you know very niche but it's one of the most popular and sort of dedicated services for people who want to watch anime but the thesis at churning at the time was anime was great um and had millions of subs i think it was the top eight uh or the number eight uh subscription service at the time kind of behind mlb and netflix and others but uh we all knew that there were sort of diminishing returns in terms of the audience just because it was niche and so one of the things that i had always been able to do well in my past jobs was figure out okay what is this based business and how do you expand by bringing adjacent content or adjacent services to make it bigger and so the thesis was can we take these several million country role subscribers who love anime add content that's adjacent to anime sci-fi and adult you know animation and other things uh and really expand the base of of uh the audience there um and so did that and ended up the company ended up selling to a t and you know they're all doing great but at that point i had met emmett scheer who's our ceo and kevin lynn who's one of our founders and they had this is i think maybe a year and a half after amazon uh had purchased them and you know they were under a little bit of pressure to do the same thing you know gaming is always going to be the core of what we do but we know gamers have a lot of adjacent interests and a lot of different things and so they wanted somebody with my experience to be able to take that uh take the service and really expand without losing the essence and the core of who we were which is gaming but to try to bring in that the new type of content and also map lay out a sort of a strategy a content strategy so that we can do things in a very twitch unique way which is really around the interactivity of bringing the community in and um and so that's kind of sort of the quick three-minute version of how i got to where i am at twitch talk to me about the creators

yeah so well we've got uh gosh it's grown immensely since i've been there in my four short years but we've got about four million creators at any given point in a month that stream on twitch right now a majority of them are our game streamers so they're playing video games and they're broadcast broadcasting it and interacting with their fans um but the creators have started to you know as with any community there's a lot of organic growth that happens on these communities and so we've had just chatting pop-ups all of a sudden we just have people wanting to talk about politics and sports and music and a bunch of other things we had people start to stream cooking streams because they were passionate about it one of the really funny experiments that we did early on is we said hey what do we what if we start airing bob ross and people are like god bob ross it's just so kind of random right like 1970s painter but the thing that resonated with bob ross and why he was so popular on twitch is i think he was the first person who at skate or you know broadcast to many thousands or millions of fans his passion was painting and a lot of twitch people kind of saw that they're like well i have this passion for gaming and i kind of see this guy's passion and that's why bob ross resonated on twitch and continues to resonate today and so um those the streamers are a pretty diverse group of folks i mean we've got when you think about the premium streamers we've got a lot of uh we've got deals with the nba and the nfl really big content so those are content creators we've got deals with media companies and then we've got deals with just a whole slew of creators who sometimes they just play video games sometimes they do a mix of different things we've got creators who are doing cooking shows we've got fitness shows now it's literally just grown into so many different things that you would think that where creators want to create content and share it with their fans and that's the basic creators right now it's hard to kind of wrap it all up into one because when you've got millions of creators there's a lot of different things that are happening on twitch but those are sort of the big buckets of categories that are growing on twitch right now hey gary i'm just going to chime in and ask a question mike you know obviously with covet happening watch time on twitch is is up tremendously but it's so entertaining like i've been on there myself and i just wanted to ask like for the brands that are listening today like what's the best way for them to be part of an authentic experience so that the you can preserve the entertaining way that people like to interact with twitch yeah i mean there's a we love there's a

lot of brands who have been joining twitch and i think you know uh one of the things that we've done is we've built a lot of oh and oh property so i have a i run a team called twitch rivals which is basically an esports tournament platform and a lot of brands have wanted to attach to that because esports is becoming is growing and big and we can you know we have a lot of great streamers who participate in it um but i think it's just like the when bran you know we have a very young engaged audience and 39 of our uh the people on our service you know don't have access to traditional tv i mean they're watching pretty much everything online and so there's a just a huge base of folks that you know these brands can reach on twitch but that they can't reach anywhere else um but you know i would say that we've just you know even if you think uh that gaming is like all we do it really isn't there's so many other different really interesting different types of content that um people are engaging with and that are that that's brand safe and that um we think would be a great opportunity for them to tap into an audience that they're not going to be able to reach anywhere else and how have the numbers been in covid what what can you share with us about i mean just we know the numbers are the numbers but like what what trends have you seen and how do you think it's going to sustain

yeah so um gosh you know we have grown immensely since the covid uh thing hit i think we you know we're up to now four million unique streamers every month um in q1 we had 79 million daily active viewers which is a lot more than last year we've got about a million and a half people that are tuning into twitch on average um and it's growing significantly from there so if you just look at general tv i mean we'd be a top three cable net just uh just if you think about scale of where we're at um you know and i think with kovid it what has happened is we've seen a massive increase in streamers um but it's also musicians who can't tour you know one of the great things about which is like now i can go and i can connect with fans that i couldn't before and so we've seen a massive influx there athletes looking to stay engaged and connecting with our fans has been a huge thing we had one of the things that happened really early on that i thought was really kind of fun was we had some of the f1 drivers lando norris charles leclerc and they were like god what are we going to do we can't race so they were running sims and then they started running their sims on twitch and now you've got like lando norris who's pulling in 20 30 000 concurrents just watching him run his sims and now he loves it because now he's got fans and now these fans are becoming you know huge lando norris fans because they love this guy he's got a great personality super cool kid he's a winner and now while he's not being able to fully train all the time but he can actually train on his sim and actually do two things at once which is continue to build that fan paste that fan base of lando norris fans um so we've seen a lot of that that different activity um across the board um you know another fun thing that happened kind of early on was you know devin booker was streaming i think he's probably streaming at call of duty and then some somebody tweeted at him one of his teammates hey i think we're on hiatus and then it you know diverted into this 30 minute what's happening are we canceling the stream and all this stuff is happening on twitch and so it's just it's hard to pinpoint exactly what's happening because you've got millions of streams but there's just so many of these different types of moments that have been happening it seems like there's been more cultural you know whether it was way back kind of the moment with you know drake and juju and ninja you know like it's it does seem like things happen on twitch like cultural moments things that hit the zeitgeist things that are talked about

about yeah i think people are starting to see that more i mean i think another one of those gary was you know i'm going to screw up his name how poor bjorn's in the mountain from yeah he was like you know what i think i'm going to try to break the world deadlift record on twitch so he does it and it's just like another one of those moments where it's like god that's it's amazing you can't script those things but people do that because he wanted to break that record with his fans and be able to share that with them and he did it um so yeah you're right gary it's at zeitgeist it's that moment and it's a great place for people to do things with that are interesting for their communities here's an important question do your parents now understand what you're up to sort of my mom still says i work for amazon so it's easier for her and it just carries a little bit more cashier i get it we let her we let it slide but yeah i think she looks at this stuff and she's like i don't understand this video game thing but it's okay you know it's like she gets it and she knows that we're happy and that things are growing and that you know i work for a company that's a it's a wonderful company um and she's super proud of it so yeah they they're getting it a little bit more but it's still a little bit like really they're watching people play video games i mean by the way that argument has been the silliest and easiest argument for me to win within three seconds gary they're watching other people play video games i'm like you watch people play golf yeah like this notion that like watching somebody else i think it's stupid to have somebody else watch somebody else doing something i'm like you mean every sport yeah exactly and the thing is if you

look back okay so i was in college in the 90s you know and swingers was a big movie i don't know one of them yes of course they're playing you know and it's hell 94 yeah i remember my friends you know we used to sit and in somebody's room and we would play goal and we'd be fighting with each other and that's we would do that for hours and we'd have like you know girlfriends would come over and we'd all just be sitting in this room and we'd just switch off and we talked a lot of smack with each other but that's been going on since the 90s when none of this stuff was connected and so like yeah it seems foreign to some folks but like the nature of video games is it's a communal thing it's a fun thing it is a way to connect with your friends with fans and so yeah it's it's definitely not actually on that no mike what video game because ironically you just brought up if somebody asked what game would i feel most confident that i can compete at the highest level meaning there is no game on earth that i'm even in the top you know half a million best players in the world it's just not what i was meant to do but if i had to play the game it would probably be nhl 94 yeah street fighter with blanca i've got this thing down with blanca that's funny okay well ironically i think it's hockey games for me or ironically ice hockey for nintendo but for you what would you say like the single game that you would argue whether you're good or not good like i am at video games is your strongest game and you would put up the best record up with that's a tough one

um i uh well i'm older gary so i work with a lot of you know 20 30 year olds in there the hand eye coordination the twitch quick twitch element this is like yeah but you might be unstoppable at like fishing derby for atari i'm pretty good at the old school game i'm pretty i'm really good at goal on nintendo i'm good at like the yeah i'm good at most of the sports games like the early early sports games yeah like rbi baseball or like baseball for nintendo baseball and the middle the early maddens was my thing um do you remember rinking i was very good at bringing i do remember me ring king um the game the current game that i'm actually not bad at um is fall guys so fall guys might need to talk about that fall guys might be the you know we're hoping it the 2020 version of fortnite or other big games it's uh this massive multiplayer game 60 players totally fun you know you go through a series of obstacles and it's the last character standing uh we just did a rival sermon so my team runs these rivals tournaments um and it was the very first fall guy tournament we had like pretty much every single one of our big creators playing and it was like sixty five thousand six hundred and fifty thousand people watching on friday this tournament and we didn't even give a big prize pool because we were like trying to pull it together it was just plastic it was like seven thousand bucks but you got people like you know some of our top streamers are making a lot of money and they're fighting over this you know for them you know seven thousand dollars a lot of money for most people but for them you know it's it's a modest prize pool in the esports world but man they were so excited about it and it's just a fun game and it and it's one of those ones where pride is worth a billion dollars exactly so we're bragging rights as well right right mike thank you so much for joining us we will be watching more twitch so we can get more entertained and really engage with some of the gamers and streamers we appreciate your time today oh yeah perfect yeah thanks for having me guys thank you this was fun hey everybody on youtube first of all thank you so much so humbled for your time i don't want to watch but time is the biggest asset so thank you for watching that video if uh if you got some value out of that there's a plenty more where that came from feel free to check it out