Number of streamers earning money on Twitch spikes by 223% in 2017

The number of Twitch content creators earning money through streaming spiked by 223% last year, according to data released by the video platform.

In a 2017 retrospective, Twitch revealed that it reached two million unique monthly broadcasters. As a result, the number Twitch Partners rose from 17,000 to over 27,000 and, since its launch in April 2017, the number of Twitch Affiliates rose from 26,476 to in excess of 150,000.

Meanwhile Twitch extensions, the platform's flagship program which allows viewers to interact directly with streamers' games, also enjoyed a positive first year.

According to Twitch, there are now over 1,700 developers working on Twitch extensions, with more than 100 currently available, including everything from Hearthstone overlays to The Game Awards 2017: Community Predictions.

It was a year of records for Twitch, which saw the highest number of concurrent viewers tune into a single stream when 245,000 people watched three-times League of Legends world champion Lee "Faker" Sang-Hyeok.

This record was almost immediately broken in 2018, however, when previously banned player Tyler "Tyler1" Steinkamp returned to the game and attracted over 300,000 concurrent viewers.

Destiny 2 also broke records, reaching 436,000 peak concurrent viewers, setting the record for the biggest game premiere of the year.

In 2017, the video streaming platform raised $30 million for charity and had over 15 million unique daily visitors, up from ten million the year prior.

Finally, Twitch revealed the most-watched new games were PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, Fortnite, Destiny 2, Fifa 18, For Honor, Call of Duty: WWII, Friday 13th, The Legend of Zelda: Breathe of the Wild, Resident Evil 7, and Gwent.