Everything you ever wanted to know about Twitch Creative
Or why live streamed art is the greatest thing ever, and how the Twitch Creative community is faring
Twitch is known first and foremost as a gaming site. From eSports to speedrunnning to variety gaming and everything in between, Twitch is the place to be for watching and streaming games live. Gaming might be what everyone comes to Twitch for, but it’s not the only thing Twitch has got cooking. There’s a small but dedicated section devoted to the creative arts, including painting, music, knitting, blacksmithing, and so much more.
The first time I watched a creative stream was off of a raid from a variety gaming streamer. I’ll be honest, I thought it would be a little boring, but I decided to stick around. The streamer was making a cross-stitched emote and chat was trying to guess the emote. It started as an empty fabric canvas and filled out more and more each time she stabbed at it with her needle. Of course, she deliberately chose her color order to make it harder to guess the emote. It wasn’t like any game streams I had watched. Most games have set beginnings and endings, and you can have a pretty good idea of how it goes from one point to another. Creative streams don’t necessarily have that structure. They start from nothing, a blank piece of paper, or even thin air. Sometimes, the streamer doesn’t know how it will turn out. This is where the true magic of Twitch Creative is. Through sheer work and their own imagination, they make something entirely new. By streaming it, they share and invite others into the process.
So how is the creative community doing on Twitch? To find out, I tracked the Creative directory and the Creative Communities over the last 3 months. I also tracked Twitch as a whole to get an idea of where Creative fit into the picture. Most of what follows is the Creative Directory together with streamers of Creative Communities, which includes streaming to (for example) IRL or Music as long as they are also streaming to Food or MusicProduction etc. Let’s start with a high-level view of Creative:
This shows the daily average viewership for the Creative directory as well as associated communities, and daily average viewership for Twitch as a whole. There’s of course a dip around the end of year holiday season in December, with a small upward trend for Twitch in February and a somewhat steeper upward trend for the last half of February in Creative. I’ll be interested to see if that continues through March.
We know Creative is a small part of Twitch. If it was larger we would have more influence and might not feel neglected at times. But it’s hard to tell from the above where Creative slots in. Let’s see what percentage of viewers Creative represents:
Creative tends to sit around the 1% range, but the upward trend in the 2nd half of February shows here as well. I think it’s time to dive a little deeper and see if we can figure out what growth areas Creative has.
Discovery through Communities
One of the big discovery features Twitch released that was particularly controversial within Creative is the ability to stream to communities. Streamers can select communities such as VarietyStreaming, Painting, or Speedrunning where their streams are listed to allow viewers another way to find streams other than picking games. The reason for the controversy is because communities replaced a well-liked system of hashtags. Has this feature been helping streamers or has it been a dud? First let’s see how many streamers even use this feature:
About 55% of Creative streamers use communities, compared to less than 40% more generally across Twitch. Creative here only shows streamers who used the Creative directory, as by definition anyone outside the directory was included because they stream to certain communities, so they would be 100% community users.
Creative partners and affiliates are the ones who use communities the most, does this imply that communities are helping them grow? I’m not so sure.
The majority of viewers aren’t watching streams that use communities. It’s not exactly a ringing endorsement of communities if adoption is low and most viewers aren’t even exposed to the feature. Maybe Creative is magically different and communities are an actual useful feature there?
Overall viewer levels are higher in Creative for streamers who use communities, although more streamers use communities too. It doesn’t appear that using communities extends the discoverability of the Creative directory much.
Communities may not be hurting your average twitch streamer, but it certainly isn’t helping much if at all. And I’m sure many within Creative would argue the switch away from hashtags was harmful to their growth. I view communities as more useful for tracking what kind of streamers are growing as opposed to something that is helping streamers to grow.
We’ll continue to look into communities, but it makes more sense to do so in the next section, as Music streamers play a significant role in the rest of the analysis.
The Rise of Music?
One thing that caught me entirely off-guard after I started this endeavor was Music. Music was one of the earliest experiments of having non-gaming content on Twitch by hosting events like the Ultra Music Festival. With the launch of Creative, most music streamers I knew streamed to the Creative directory, with some shifting to IRL over time due to the changes to Creative. What I didn’t anticipate was music streamers picking up the Music directory and using that again. Music streaming is not something I am overly familiar with, but I would love to get into that side of things more.
Let’s touch back on communities and add in the streamers from outside the Creative directory:
It looks like overall Creative streamers who use communities are indeed trending upwards. Comparing this graph with the directory-only graph implies that most of the growth is coming from streamers outside the directory. But which communities are the ones that are growing?
The more “traditional” creative communities show quite a bit of stability over this time. It’s difficult to say if Music is growing, but it shows much more variability, and is somewhat counter-cyclical to the rest of Creative. Despite the fact that Twitch associates Music with Creative, Music has always felt somewhat distinct from the rest of Creative.
Apart from Music the rest of creative looks like it’s largely floated in place. But there’s that same 2nd half of February bump. This is without Music, so what’s causing it?
This is the glimmer of hope in Creative for me. A number of the smaller communities in Creative have trended upwards, especially in February. This bottom-up varied growth is very different from the top-down growth often seen in gaming where you have a handful of large games instead of a whole bunch of smaller games.
Parting Thoughts
I first want to say that the individual creator market is not small. One only has to look at the success of Patreon or Etsy to see the large number of people who are creating art, and the even greater number of supporters. There is a vast potential if these creators decided to expand their influence and begin live streaming their efforts.
Twitch Creative is not at its healthiest right now, but there’s reasons to be positive about the community. I wish the directory was showing growth, but it appears some creative casters have been able to make lemonade and find growth elsewhere. I’m certain with the strength of the creative market that live streaming art will become a big thing and some company will be able to capitalize on it. The question we’re left with is, will that company be Twitch?
If you have any questions or comments, I’d love to hear them. You can find me on Twitter here.
