On October 27th, it was revealed that Facebook Gaming surpassed YouTube Gaming viewership during the third quarter of 2021. According to Streamlabs and Stream Hatchet, Facebook Gaming reportedly amassed 1.29 billion hours of viewed content while YouTube Gaming only recorded 1.13 billion hours.
Additionally, the report showed that Facebook Gaming saw a 59% increase in viewership during Q3 2021. Meanwhile, YouTube Gaming saw a 32.5% viewership decrease year-over-year.
Less than one week later, Ryan Wyatt (the head of YouTube Gaming), announced the platform would be expanding on its esports and gaming offerings. This is expected to include gifted memberships, new tools for live stream moderators, and improved discoverability.
The organization will reportedly continue to develop its VOD, shorts, and live streaming categories. Furthermore, YouTube Gaming is promising to create 10 different ways for creators to monetize their YouTube content.
The Profit‘s Take:
Being right never gets old. It’s always the same great feeling. What struck me was that NONE of these “innovations” are new. Twitch has been doing these types of things for a while. I can’t tell if YouTube Gaming just has a bad management team or the worst management team in all of esports. Given the people involved, it is unsurprising that YouTube isn’t living up to expectations. YouTube Gaming knows it’s losing and not growing as fast as it should. It has all the technology and assets of Google and YouTube at its disposal, and the best thing they can come up with is a bunch of features that Twitch introduced years ago. WHERE IS THE INNOVATION?! Why can’t management drive innovation rather than look at the company across the street and try to copy them? This is mind-blowingly bad. If I work at Google, I’m firing everyone at YouTube Gaming tomorrow. This is embarrassing. This says a lot about Facebook Gaming. It’s a pretty big accomplishment with the amount of growth they have been able to achieve. This business would be a failure if it were not a part of Google or YouTube. I’m curious to see what Facebook is doing better because I haven’t seen a ton of innovation from them either.
(All information was provided by Dot Esports and Gamesindustry.biz)