I'm 22 and have been watching twitch very regularly since I started college in 2013. I think my age group is the main demographic twitch targets, and I can say myself and many of my friends watch for the streamers and community more than the games themselves. Lirik, a streamer I have watched for years, is someone I would watch play literally any game due to how entertaining his personality is.
May be anecdotal, but many of my friends have the same mindset. Besides watching competitive eSports tournaments for specific games, usually someone will have a few streamers they will watch play anything.
I worked on research projects with large traditional live TV broadcasters. Their viewer demographic was 56+ and aging year by year. Even in those early days of Twitch top online streamers were attracting larger audiences than their top programs and that was not even on their radar.
I've never really spent time on Twitch but I guess I've always assumed it's for teens. Maybe that's just bias though, I assume teens are also the primary target of video games.
It's a new(ish) platform whose demographic (people who enjoy video games) is growing larger every year. Today's 40 and 50 year olds don't play nearly as many games as the next decade's will. Whether or not they can wrangle that into marketing $$$ is another story.
The way people use Twitch makes little sense to me. It might have to do with some age gap, but it doesn't seem like 10-15 years should really make this big of a disconnect. When I think of gaming it is strictly about playing for fun and engaging with friends in a kind of hanging out in a living room together way.
Maybe that is how all twitch channels start off, but once you hit some threshold where the streamer can no longer engage with the audience in any personable way and it becomes more of a job it is no longer appealing to me. It is even as far as off-putting to where I'd avoid it and those kinds of communities.
I occasionally stream to 0-3 people for the fun of it and to talk to people as if we were in a room together as that is more what gaming is to me. It seems that I'm in the very small minority these days though.
You sure about that? It currently has the second-highest viewership on Twitch, topped only by League of Legends (which is surprisingly almost a decade old).
The far majority of twitch streamers do not have some illustrious career waiting for them. People in big cities with competitive degrees are underrepresented on twitch relative to other areas.
> Most of the big earners started streaming within the last 5 years
I'm not sure what numbers you are referring to. There was a huge increasing in streaming and watching during the pandemic. Many of the big streamers are in their late 20s or even early 30s. Which is relatively old considering you can start streaming in your teens.
I moderate a Twitch channel that has about 800 viewers for any given stream. (1100 paid subscribers or thereabout.) I don't do it every day, but I do find the streamer entertaining and I play the game he streams, so it's a somewhat educational (you can apply what you watch to your own gameplay) way to zone out and not do any thinking. Sometimes you feel like watching, sometimes you feel like playing. Since I started watching Twitch streams, I honestly haven't watched normal TV and couldn't name any current TV programs or movies; Twitch has taken that over. (Why watch instead of play? Rank is at stake and if I'm tired and not going to be making good decisions quickly, I'm just going to throw the game and lose my precious precious SR.)
You are right that the audience skews very young. Most of the viewers are half my age, and act like it... but we do do a pretty good job keeping the discussion intelligent. Most people write off Twitch chat, but if actively curated it can be educational, interesting, and inviting to more than just the "I'm 15 and my parents won't let me watch TV so I'm watching this on my phone" demographic. Most channels stopped trying; we try and we're doing okay.
Some games are easier to watch than others. Overwatch is fine, it's a very action-packed game and there are no boring moments. I play Hearthstone but honestly don't watch any streams because it's just sitting there for 70 seconds waiting for the streamer (or their opponent) to make a decision. I do watch edited videos on YouTube to see how decks I don't play work, however.
The downtime can really be a killer, though. I was watching a popular Hearthstone streamer play over the weekend (I was bored) and she spent most of the time playing that game where you draw something and the AI guesses it while waiting for her opponent to take their turn. Not worth my time.
I mean maybe, but it's just as the person you replied to said:
Lot of us grew up playing videogames with all of our free time. We are adults now. People in our age bracket who watch Twitch video game streams often probably do so to replace some of that time we wish we could be gaming.
I can't speak on younger generation's consumption of Twitch and Youtube but I imagine for them it's just as normal as watching TV, playing video games, watching videos on the internet (in the early days), or to liken it to something people my generation and older did: going outside and playing.
"When I'm developing software... I don't talk. I might do an odd grumble to myself every once in a while, but the loudest thing in the room, by far, is my keyboard"
That's often true of games too, though, and Twitch has plenty of popular streamers. I think their greater issue is that the steroetypical twitch viewer in their young teens is unlikely to be interested, and older people who might be interested are more likely to be time strapped. Though as I dig around looking for twitch demographics, it looks like the college aged 18-24 is Twitch's biggest group, so there might be a decent overlap.
I wonder if it might be a good idea for them to push the event angle more, with a special focus around on-campus things like hackathons or contests. If you had screen forwarding set up between multiple projects/competitors, it might be interesting to have a "caster" that helped walk viewers through what the different groups were doing.
I don't play as much video games as much anymore but I had 5000 loyal followers that would take my word as the gospel.
I had some offers on a dozen gaming networks, the biggest one was TGN. I would categorize twitch followers based on age demographic, since this is most of the behavioral trends I noticed
Young millenials have nothing to better to do sometimes and really enjoy having that "virtual friend" / "virtual older sibling" mentality when it comes to video games. It fills a void they have and its easily accessible, all they need is their phone and internet. No need to schedule things with your buddies who might not be in the mood to game. Example, pewdiepie's viewers are on the younger demographic end
General agnostic age categories - I would divide into four areas regardless of age.
- One (like me) who still likes gaming and wants to keep up with some games mostly out of curiosity / bc I don't have time, so I watch gameplay videos mostly on youtube. I skip ahead sometimes and only watch videos here and there, sometimes at 2x speed.
- Two, people who have nothing better to do and enjoy watching streamers as a form of entertainment. Sometimes I would fit in this category as well, I watch a few fortnite players (nickeh30) who just have a great personality and are able to pull complex movements that only maybe 0.1% of players could do.
- Third, people looking to get better at the game by watching streamers. I sometimes fit in above category
- Fourth, we also have the esports area. This is your diehard sports-level fandom and I used to be a huge fan of DoTA partially because I played it for 10+ years and played with some of the top players competing today. It was nostalgia for me if anything, much like people who loved soccer growing up watched the world cup
So there you go, that's how I categorize gamers on twitch. You also have kappa trolls among other things and also softcore porn tailored towards parental controlled networks for kids nearing puberty but that's a totally different story. Then you also have programming streams, we get a largely mostly older / smarter tech audience for that.
Twitch does have an API as well if you want to do data analytics on it
A guide to playing many popular games on twitch, written even a few months back, is outdated much faster than even JavaScript framework best practices. As a consequence of this, content which is new has natural advantages over content which is not new. Content even a week old can be so out-dated as to be worthless, not just in theory but frequently in practice. In fact, the strength of the advice and the likelihood that the advice is outdated within a week are actually correlated, because game developers do balance patches.
From these observations, if you assume that people are watching gaming content to learn, you should be able to reduce confusion at the popularity of live content on twitch and start to get an understanding of why Twitch does not represent a step backwards.
I recently started using Twitch for poker streaming channels, but I also like to watch the video game play, since I don't have to go through any learning/skill curve to play any game myself - I can sit and watch play, and be entertained (team battles) or depressed (Assassin's Creed) with what players are doing with their time.
I'm definitely out of the target demographic for Twitch, but I consider it an additional entertainment channel when I'm bored of content in traditional media such as Youtube TV and Netflix.
- predominantly male, thus you're already capped at more or less 50%
- predominantly gamer, thus you already have to cut that 50% by some more
- predominantly PC gamer (good reduction in demographics)
- of those games, it's mostly competitive online games (yet another reduction in demographics)
- speaks the same language and can comprehend his favorite streamer (a huge reduction in demographics)
- will choose to watch a longer, unformatted content of his favorite streamer playing his favorite game over watching the same content, edit, with highlights, etc on his Youtube channel
Twitch's greatness isn't that 27% is quite a striking number, but it's revenue per user I believe is quite higher than any other social out there.
As someone that views Twitch every day I can say I never watch the entirety of a stream. You drop in and view when you have time. It is less akin to watching a TV show and more like going to your friends house and hanging out to watch some of the game.
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