Amazon announced Monday that the company negotiated a deal to purchase Twitch.tv for the small sum of $970 million. Google (YouTube) had been in negotiations since May to acquire Twitch, but were unable to close the deal. This gives Amazon the most popular avenue for game streaming. Although Google owns YouTube, Twitch reaches a very different market, and this can't be seen by Google as anything other than a slap in the face. It will be interesting to see if Google rises to the challenge and duels it out with Amazon – hopefully bringing their YouTube streaming service to a more complete status (corporate blood sport, how wonderful).

As video game streaming takes off on a tear, we see the relatively new concept of watching others play games increase in its global domination. Twitch.tv, the most prolific game streaming service, recently announced its traffic and demographic statistics for 2013 in its annual review. Some of the stats are shocking -- although perhaps least surprising is the growth of MOBAs in popularity. Let's tear-down the stats.

Twitch is now in the top 300 websites in the world.

By the beginning of 2012, Twitch.tv had just barely broken into the top 3000 websites in the world (source); entering 2014, Twitch is presently ranked 223 in the US and 336 globally. Alexa is admittedly not the most accurate site analytics system, but given the volume that larger sites move, it's a fair estimate for a site like Twitch. For a website entirely dedicated to gaming and streaming, those stats are pretty damn impressive -- we have to keep in mind that the average internet user doesn't even understand the concept of watching gameplay (top sites still include Google and Facebook).