The Rise and Fall of Gambling in Twitch Streaming
Twitch is a live streaming platform with over 30 million daily active visitors. Over 2.5 million people watch live streams at any given time. The Slots category was recently ranked in the top ten most watched live stream categories. The content sees the broadcaster live streamed their bets on their favourite casino games.
Streaming Online Casino Games on Twitch has a huge audience. One content creator had a jackpot win of $4.718 million. The audience are drawn in with high stakes bets that start from $1,000. The increase in win to loss ratio supports the growing length of streaming time in a single sitting. It seems that big stakes, high emotions and bigger reactions are what keeps viewers interested.
There is a growing concern that people are gambling too much on Twitch streaming. Twitch has banned gambling as of August 2021. New policy will be put into place on October 18 2022. Some streamers are calling for gambling to be banned completely on the site. Some others are continuing to put stringent labels on their channels to maintain their streams as they are. The new policy still leaves some questions as to what is and is not allowed on Twitch. It has named unlicensed sites that are harmful.
The rise and fall of online gambling streaming has been documented. One French-Canadian broadcaster has amassed a total of 1.2 billion views on their channel.