Twitch vs YouTube Gaming vs Kick Market Share 2026 [Hours Watched, Quarterly Splits and Creator Counts]
Live-streaming market share is counted in hours watched, and the result depends on what a tracker includes. Stream Hatchet’s gaming data puts Twitch far ahead of YouTube Gaming and Kick, but its newer scope adds YouTube’s non-gaming streams and shrinks all three. Each table below uses one tracker, so figures within a table compare directly. Data runs from January 2025 to September 2026.
Key Twitch vs YouTube Gaming vs Kick market share statistics 2026
- Twitch held 21.0% of the 21.5 billion hours watched across tracked live-streaming platforms in Q2 2026, against 8.3% for YouTube Gaming and 6.3% for Kick.
- Kick’s hours watched rose 36.7% year over year to 1.34 billion in Q2 2026, while Twitch fell 8.3% and YouTube Gaming fell 18.9%.
- Twitch recorded 19.2 billion hours watched in 2025, YouTube Gaming 8.8 billion and Kick 4.5 billion, a 131% annual rise for Kick.
- Twitch generated about three times Kick’s hours watched in Q2 2026, down from about five times a year earlier.
- Kick passed 1 million average viewers for the first time in September 2026, reaching 1.09 million.
Twitch vs YouTube Gaming vs Kick market share in Q2 2026
| Platform | Hours watched | Market share | Change vs Q1 2026 | Change vs Q2 2025 |
| YouTube Live | 12.97 billion | 60.3% | +2.7% | +18.0% |
| Twitch | 4.52 billion | 21.0% | -0.7% | -8.3% |
| YouTube Gaming | 1.79 billion | 8.3% | -19.3% | -18.9% |
| Kick | 1.34 billion | 6.3% | +5.5% | +36.7% |
| All other tracked platforms | About 0.88 billion | 4.1% | Not reported | Not reported |
| Total | 21.5 billion | 100% | +0.1% | +7.6% |
This was the first Streamlabs and Stream Hatchet report to count YouTube Live, YouTube’s non-gaming streams, so Twitch’s 21.0% cannot be compared with older gaming-only shares. Kick was the only comparison platform to grow both quarter over quarter and year over year, and its hours now equal 75% of YouTube Gaming’s. YouTube Gaming lost about 430 million hours from Q1 2026’s 2.22 billion, partly because esports broadcasts spread across more platforms: YouTube’s share of LCK hours watched fell from 46.5% in 2025 to 25.5% in 2026. Our League of Legends player statistics cover that game’s wider audience. The “all other” row is the total minus the four named platforms and includes Steam, up 56.7% quarter over quarter to 113.6 million hours; its player side is in our Steam user trends.
Twitch vs YouTube Gaming vs Kick gaming market share by quarter
| Quarter | Twitch | YouTube Gaming | Kick | Split of the three (Twitch / YouTube Gaming / Kick) |
| Q1 2025 | 5.27B | 1.94B | 0.77B | 66.0% / 24.3% / 9.7% |
| Q2 2025 | 4.9B | 2.2B | 0.98B | 60.6% / 27.2% / 12.2% |
| Q3 2025 | 4.61B | 2.50B | 1.53B | 53.4% / 28.9% / 17.7% |
| Q4 2025 | 4.38B | 2.19B | 1.22B | 56.2% / 28.1% / 15.7% |
| Q1 2026 | 4.55B | 2.22B | 1.27B | 56.6% / 27.6% / 15.8% |
| Q2 2026 | 4.52B | 1.79B | 1.34B | 59.1% / 23.4% / 17.5% |
The split column is calculated from each row’s hours, and the Q2 2025 figures are rounded in their source. Kick’s slice grew from 9.7% to 17.5% in six quarters, and Twitch went from 6.8 times Kick’s hours in Q1 2025 to 5.0 times in Q2 2025 and 3.4 times in Q2 2026, in line with Streams Charts’ separate estimate. Twitch’s slice rose in Q2 2026 despite fewer hours because YouTube Gaming fell faster. The 2025 quarters add up to Stream Hatchet’s annual totals of 19.2, 8.8 and 4.5 billion hours, and Stream Hatchet tied Twitch’s slide to a mid-year viewbot crackdown. Viewership of Twitch’s top creators fell 14.5% in 2025 as Baiano and Gaules moved to YouTube Gaming and Kick. Kick’s best quarter is still Q3 2025 at 1.53 billion hours, before a 20.5% drop. Its Q2 2026 esports hours rose 66% on Q1, mostly from Counter-Strike’s IEM Cologne Major , a title profiled in our Counter-Strike 2 user statistics.
Twitch vs Kick monthly market share gap in Q3 2026
| Month | Twitch hours watched | Kick hours watched | Kick as % of Twitch |
| July 2026 | 1.47 billion | 593.4 million | 40.4% |
| August 2026 | 1.56 billion | 669.14 million | 42.9% |
| September 2026 | 1.47 billion | 773.8 million | 52.6% |
| Q3 2026 total | 4.50 billion | 2.04 billion | 45.3% |
Streams Charts counts channels its own way, so these monthly totals belong with each other rather than with the Stream Hatchet tables above. In its data, Kick moved from about a third of Twitch’s watch time in Q2 2026 to 45.3% in Q3. September did most of the work. Twitch fell 5.89% from August, its strongest month of 2026, and its active channels dropped 11% to just over 2.9 million. Kick rose 15.65% to a record and lifted average viewers 21.31%. The September YouTube Gaming recap ranks channels without a platform total, led by TheBurntPeanut at 8.77 million hours.
Twitch vs YouTube Gaming vs Kick creator base and viewers per channel
| Platform | Unique channels, Q2 2026 | Change vs Q1 2026 | Viewers per channel |
| Twitch | 7.94 million | -9.1% | About 23 |
| YouTube Gaming | 878,000 | -17.9% | 78 |
| Kick | 807,700 | +5.4% | About 85 |
| YouTube Live | 699,000 | -19.7% | About 308 |
Twitch has 9.8 times as many broadcasting channels as Kick but produces only 3.4 times its hours watched. The viewers-per-channel column points the same way, at about 85 for Kick against 23 for Twitch. Kick was the only major platform to add channels in Q2 2026, up 5.4% on Q1 and 45.5% year over year, and it now has 92% as many channels as YouTube Gaming. Its hours streamed grew 45.9% year over year, the fastest rate tracked, while YouTube Gaming’s unique channels fell 28.2% year over year.
Twitch vs Kick GTA V market share
| GTA V metric | Twitch | Kick |
| Hours watched, July 2026 | 49.5 million | 82.5 million |
| Average viewers, July 2026 | 68,600 | 112,300 |
| Hours watched, July 2025 | 67.9 million | Not reported |
| Share of 12 dual-platform creators’ GTA V hours, January 2026 | 59% | 41% |
| Share of 12 dual-platform creators’ GTA V hours, July 2026 | 10% | 90% |
Kick produced 67% more GTA V hours than Twitch in July 2026 and has led the category in average viewers since April. Kick’s creator shares in the table are the remainder of each pair’s combined hours, and migration explains only part of the lead: 20 of Kick’s 30 most-watched GTA V channels do not stream the game on Twitch. Rockstar was Kick’s top publisher in Q1 2026 with 193 million hours watched. Twitch’s GTA V hours recovered to 76.7 million in September 2026, up 59% from August, after a new NoPixel roleplay server opened. Sales and player counts sit in our GTA V player statistics.
