9 Impressive Stats About Twitch That Show Why Amazon Just Purchased It For $970 Million

Amazon announced on Monday that it purchased Twitch for $970 million. Twitch is a website where video game enthusiasts can view and participate in live streams of video games in real time.

Unless you're familiar with the video game community, chances are you've probably never heard of Twitch. However, it accounts for a surprising amount of internet traffic - nearly as much as giant Web brands like Netflix and Google among others.

1. Twitch accounts for more than 43% of all live video-streaming traffic by volume.

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2. Twitch falls right behind Netflix, Apple, and Google when it comes to peak internet traffic in the U.S., according to the Wall Street Journal. It accounts for 1.8% of peak internet traffic, which is just above Hulu at 1.7%.

3. Twitch amassed more than 8 million unique users after its first month.

4. And the numbers have kept growing since then. The site now has 55 million users.

5. Twitch amassed about 45.6 million unique visitors and more than 8 billion page views for the period of time between July 26 and August 22, according to Quantcast.

6. 58% of Twitch users spend more than 20 hours a week watching videos on its site. That's almost 3 hours a day.

7. On average, 12 billion minutes of content was watched per month on Twitch's website in 2013, according to the company.

8. The average user spends 106 minutes per day watching content on Twitch. That's about an hour and 45 minutes each day.

9. 76% of Twitch's users are between the ages of 18 and 49. Only a third of these people go to traditional video game websites for news, and many of them are cord cutters and don't have traditional cable TV.

Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through his personal investment company Bezos Expeditions.