14 DAY TRIAL // The rumor that Google was in talks to purchase Twitch has been around for about a month, but now it seems that the deal is closer to becoming a reality as the two companies settled on the sum.
Sources told VentureBeat that the game live streaming company has agreed to a $1 billion (€742 million) price tag, which Google is more than willing to pay.
It is expected that the deal will be formally announced in the near future now that the terms of the agreement have been laid down. However, not even the rumor mill knows when this will happen, so we’ll all just have to wait.
Even so, the Twitch investors are reportedly pleased with the significant returns resulted from the $1 billion (€742 million) deal, which will fill their pockets with a considerably larger sum than they originally invested.
If there’s one thing that this deal makes obvious is the growing importance of live streaming over the Internet. While YouTube is already sporting this particular capability, Twitch takes things a step further because it allows gamers to share live sessions of their adventures.
Most likely, Google will use the Twitch acquisition to boost its YouTube offering for such recordings, especially since gaming videos are already some of the most sought after content on the platform. PewDiePie, for instance, is a Swedish video game commentator that has managed to attract the most subscribers on the entire platform, namely 28.9 million of them.
Twitch has over 50 million monthly active users and some 1.1 million members that actually broadcast videos each month. The platform has grown so fast in the past few years that it has drawn the attention of Internet giants, including Google’s. Just to get an idea about how much the company has grown, Twitch had only a little over 3 million monthly active users in 2011.
The company has managed to raise about $35 million (€26 million) in investments so far, so the $1 billion price is indeed quite a profitable deal.
YouTube was purchased by Google back in 2006 for $1.65 billion (€1.22 billion) and has proven to be one of its best investments. The platform has grown to become the third most visited website in the entire world with more than 1 billion unique users visiting the platform each month.
People watch over 6 billion hours of videos on YouTube, which is a little under an hour for every person on Earth. The site is now localized in over 60 countries and languages.