Twitch's Gaming Pivot

A story about how Twitch made the pivotal decision to focus on gaming despite it being a tiny portion of their traffic on Justin.tv.

"Justin.tv was a site where anyone could create their own live TV channel. There was this small corner of the site where guys were watching video games - it was only 2% of the traffic. But they had to make a change because they were about to fail.

They had two things working in their favor. First, they were completely out of options - they were going to run out of money and fail unless they tried something dramatically different. When you have nothing to lose, you play completely differently.

The most popular content on Justin.tv was illegal sports streams, which they couldn't build a business around. But Emmett personally enjoyed watching the gaming streams, so he decided to focus on what he found interesting.

The company actually split in half. Michael Seibel and Justin Kan wanted to do Socialcam - Instagram for video. They got instant funding, press, and all the talented people wanted to work there. Even Jacob, who's still at Twitch today as the OG designer, originally wanted to join Socialcam but was told the team was full and had to work with Emmett instead.

What seemed like the worse option - leaning into this weird behavior of gamers streaming themselves playing for 8 hours a day - turned out to be the winning move."