Twitch brings its fans back to the San Diego Convention Center from 13 to 15 November 2026 for TwitchCon, a convention built around people who watch other people play games.1 The service began in June 2011 as the gaming corner of Justin.tv. Three years later Amazon bought it.2
Twitch is an option in fifteen of our rankings, and almost none of them were written with it in mind. It shows up among streaming services, social networks, famous websites, startup pivots, San Francisco companies, purple logos and the internet's worst comment sections.
Twitch was a side tab on Justin.tv that outgrew its parent, and every list it joins still measures it against something bigger: Netflix, YouTube, Amazon, even its own chat.
Twitch vs Kick: the best live streaming platform
This ranking asks the question people type into Google about Twitch: which service is best for watching someone broadcast live. Twitch faces YouTube Live, Kick, TikTok Live, Rumble and a long tail that includes Trovo, DLive and Steam Broadcasting.
Twitch has the strongest claim to having built the category. Streams Charts measured its share of all tracked live hours at 14.2% for July to September 2026, up from 13.8% three months earlier.3
Kick is the challenger with the momentum. The same report counted 2.04 billion hours watched on Kick, a rise of 30.7% in one quarter, helped by a 95/5 revenue split that favours streamers.
YouTube is the giant that both of them chase. It still held 43% of the tracked hours, though that was down from 49.5% in the spring quarter, so the shift in live viewing is not only a Twitch-versus-Kick story.
Netflix and the streaming services Twitch was never built to beat
Here Twitch competes with Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, Spotify and Crunchyroll for one word: streaming. Most of that field sells a library you watch whenever you like.
Twitch sells a schedule. A stream starts at a set hour, the chat reacts in real time, and most of what airs is never watched again.
The tie between the two worlds is Amazon, which owns both Twitch and Amazon Prime Video, another option on this list.
Google buys YouTube vs Amazon buys Twitch
Ranking the best tech acquisitions means weighing famous checks: Google buys YouTube, Facebook buys Instagram, Disney buys Pixar, Microsoft buys Activision Blizzard. "Amazon buys Twitch" is one of sixteen deals on it.
Amazon announced the deal on 25 August 2014 and paid about $970 million in cash. Its press release said Twitch viewers had watched more than 15 billion minutes of video that July.2
YouTube is the obvious comparison. Google paid $1.65 billion in stock in 2006 for a video site that had existed for 20 months, and both deals bought a platform before rivals understood what it would become.
Twitch vs Whole Foods: Amazon's best acquisition
Amazon's own shopping list is a different contest. Twitch appears beside Whole Foods Market, Zappos, IMDb, Audible, Ring, Kiva Systems, Zoox and One Medical.
Whole Foods is the heavyweight. Amazon paid $13.7 billion for the grocery chain in 2017, still its largest purchase.
Twitch was a bet on something new. In the 2014 announcement Jeff Bezos said: "And, amazingly, Twitch is only three years old."2
Kiva Systems has the quietest claim of all. Amazon bought the warehouse-robot maker for $775 million in 2012, and its machines now move goods through Amazon's fulfilment centres.
Discord, Reddit and Twitch on the best social network
Twitch looks out of place on a social network list that also holds Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Discord and Reddit. Nobody posts a status update on Twitch.
What Twitch has is the chat column beside every stream, where a few hundred regulars learn each other's names. In July 2014, by Amazon's count, more than a million people broadcast on the service.
Discord is the closest relative here: many streamers keep a Discord server for the hours when they are offline.
Twitch among the 18 best websites ever made
The best websites of all time puts Twitch beside Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, Craigslist, the Internet Archive and MySpace. Most of those sites taught people to search, buy or read.
Twitch taught them to watch a stranger play a game, and the habit spread fast. In February 2014, under three years after launch, The Wall Street Journal ranked Twitch the fourth-largest US website by peak internet traffic, Amazon noted when it announced the deal.2
Wikipedia is the opposite kind of site, written slowly and meant to last. A Twitch stream is made live and mostly forgotten by the next evening.
Instagram, TikTok and Twitch: the most influential apps of the 2010s
The decade's most influential app is a fight between Instagram, TikTok, Uber, WhatsApp, Spotify and Tinder. Twitch is the entry that started life as a website for people at desks.
Twitch launched in June 2011, eight months after Instagram arrived on the iPhone.
Instagram changed what people photograph. Twitch changed what counts as a job: streaming video games full time became a real career during the 2010s, and live sections with chat and tipping later appeared across the big video platforms.
Slack vs Twitch: the greatest startup pivot
The greatest startup pivot of all time collects companies that became famous for their second idea. Slack grew out of a failed online game called Glitch, Instagram out of a check-in app called Burbn, YouTube out of a video dating site.
Twitch's pivot happened inside one company. Justin.tv launched in San Francisco in 2007 to stream one founder's life around the clock, then opened to anyone with a camera, and gaming became its busiest category.
In 2011 the founders gave gaming its own site. By 2014 the parent company had renamed itself Twitch Interactive and shut Justin.tv down.
The list has a pattern worth noticing: failed games keep producing companies. Flickr began as a photo feature inside Game Neverending, and Slack was the internal chat tool of the team making Glitch, which closed in 2012. Discord came from the makers of a mobile game called Fates Forever.
Twitch belongs to the other family, the side project that ate the main product. Netflix, Shopify, PayPal and Avon make the same list, and Avon's founder was selling books door to door when he noticed customers liked his free perfume more.
Stripe, Airbnb and Twitch in the Y Combinator class
This alumni ranking covers startups that passed through the same Silicon Valley accelerator: Reddit, Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox, Coinbase, DoorDash and Twitch.
Y Combinator's directory lists Twitch in its Winter 2007 batch, founded in 2006 in San Francisco.4 It names Emmett Shear, Justin Kan and Kyle Vogt as founders, and Vogt later co-founded the self-driving company Cruise.
Twitch made a hobby into a spectator sport.
Levi Strauss to Twitch: companies founded in San Francisco
San Francisco's company ranking starts with the 1850s. Levi Strauss & Co. dates from 1853, Ghirardelli and Folgers from the same decades, while the newer entries include Salesforce, Uber, Airbnb, Discord and OpenAI.
Twitch belongs because Justin.tv started in the city and Twitch still keeps its headquarters there.
Levi's made work trousers for miners and ended up with one of the most copied garments in the world. Twitch has the same shape on a shorter clock: a product for a niche crowd that the wider culture borrowed.
Steam vs Twitch: the best website for gamers
Among sites built for players, Twitch faces Steam, Discord, IGN, Nexus Mods, Metacritic, itch.io, Speedrun.com and Kotaku.
Steam is where games are bought. Valve launched it in 2003, and for most PC players it is the first program they open.
Twitch is where games are watched, and Y Combinator's directory still describes it as "the world's leading video platform and community for gamers".4
Speedrun.com shows how closely the two worlds overlap. Its leaderboards depend on video proof, and much of that proof is recorded from live streams.
TwitchCon vs E3: the best gaming convention
This is the ranking where Twitch's convention, not its website, is the option. TwitchCon faces E3, Gamescom, PAX, BlizzCon, Tokyo Game Show, QuakeCon and EVO.
TwitchCon was first held in San Francisco in 2015 and added a European edition in 2019. Most of its rivals exist to show new games; TwitchCon exists for streamers and the people who watch them.
E3 is the ghost on the list. The Los Angeles expo ran from 1995 and hosted the big console reveals until it was cancelled for good in 2023.
QuakeCon has the oldest roots among the fan events: a bring-your-own-computer LAN party in the Dallas area since 1996.
Twitch vs Yahoo!: the most iconic purple logo
The most iconic purple logo is a short list, because few brands commit to the colour. Twitch is on it with Yahoo!, FedEx, Hallmark, Roku, Craigslist and NYU.
Twitch's speech-bubble mark, known as the Glitch, was refreshed in a 2019 rebrand and is one of the few logos a viewer can recognise from a tiny browser tab.
Yahoo! has used purple as its signature colour since 2009 and kept it through redesigns in 2013 and 2019. FedEx is the half-purple case, with the orange "Ex" doing the rest of the work.
Twitch chat vs 4chan: the most toxic comment section
This is the list Twitch would least like to be on. "Twitch chat" faces YouTube comments, X, 4chan, Reddit, Steam reviews and the old IMDb message boards.
Twitch's defence is AutoMod, its automatic chat filter. A 2025 audit presented at the ACL conference found that up to 94% of hateful messages got past it on some test sets, while it blocked up to 89.5% of harmless messages that used sensitive words in educational or empowering contexts.5
4chan is the standard every other entry gets measured against: an anonymous board with almost no moderation.
Twitch chat has one thing 4chan lacks, a streamer watching it live who can ban a user in a second.
TikTok, YouTube and Twitch on the apps that waste the most time
The list of apps that waste the most of your time is an unflattering one, and Twitch shares it with TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Netflix and Candy Crush.
Twitch earns its place with long streams. Viewers watched 4.51 billion hours on Twitch in the third quarter of 2026, according to Streams Charts, close to 49 million hours a day.3
TikTok takes attention in fifteen-second pieces. Twitch asks you to keep a six-hour stream open in a second window, and plenty of those hours are background noise.
A purple tab that never stopped being compared
Fifteen years after it split from Justin.tv, Twitch is still measured against neighbours that dwarf it: Netflix for viewers, YouTube for live hours, Whole Foods for Amazon's money. On the gaming lists it leads with its own field, and on the chat lists it carries its worst habits in public.
All fifteen run on the head-to-head method, two options per vote, so a reader can push Twitch up or down any of them in a minute.
Have a platform, a streamer or a convention that belongs in a matchup of its own? Start a ranking and set the question yourself.
More rankings, more angles
- YouTube: Best Streaming Service or Best Social Network? 16 Lists — the giant Twitch chases for live hours
- Is Reddit the Best Social Media? 21 Years, 13 Lists — another Y Combinator alumnus with a noisy crowd
- Where Does Markiplier Rank Among the Greatest YouTubers? 12 Lists — a creator who built a career on gameplay video
Sources
- TwitchCon — TwitchCon San Diego, November 13–15, 2026, San Diego Convention Center: twitchcon.com (checked 2026-11-12)
- Amazon — "Amazon.com to Acquire Twitch", 25 August 2014: price, launch month, July 2014 viewing figures, WSJ traffic ranking and Jeff Bezos quote: press.aboutamazon.com (checked 2026-11-12)
- Streams Charts — Q3 2026 global livestreaming landscape, 13 October 2026: hours watched and platform shares: streamscharts.com (checked 2026-11-12)
- Y Combinator — company directory entry for Twitch: batch, founding year, location, founders and description: ycombinator.com (checked 2026-11-12)
- Shukla et al., "Silencing Empowerment, Allowing Bigotry: Auditing the Moderation of Hate Speech on Twitch", ACL 2025: aclanthology.org (checked 2026-11-12)