The New Twitch Creative

How new categories and tags are breathing life back into Creative

One day, I was feeling like my Twitch world was getting a little stale. I decided to look through the Creative directory to get out of my bubble and see who was out there and come across some new artists. A thumbnail caught my eye, and I found someone who makes the most incredible paper-cut dreamboxes. Of course, most channels I watch weren’t found by scrolling through for random channels, so discovery is a huge topic of discussion and focus with Twitch.

https://www.twitch.tv/britthebadger

Twitch introduced new discovery updates in late September: Tags across all of Twitch, and new categories replacing Creative and IRL. Tags were a welcome change, but people were more divided about splitting Creative into smaller pieces. Today we’re taking a look at both changes to see what impact they’ve had.

New Categories

Creative has never been a large portion of Twitch, so the concerns with new categories is that it would dilute the categories and push creative streams even lower. From what I’ve found, the discovery updates have given Creative a small, but noticeable, bump in viewership along with some nice side effects.

A lot of the change in viewership is due to IRL creatives “coming home”, but the discovery updates have brought in more growth and viewership

Creative hasn’t been doing the greatest over the last few months, but after tags and the new categories were introduced Creative is at or above the best levels we’ve been at in recent months.

We’ve avoided the worst case scenario of the new categories splitting Creative into nothingness. Adoption of the new categories looks pretty good from streamers both within the old Creative directory and those that had moved to IRL. The new categories and tags together make it easy to pick out specific art forms for viewers (and me to analyze). This should generate higher quality paths to channels that viewers want, instead of having a cooking streamer next to a programmer next to an artist.

The split into new categories has had a small positive effect and it will be easier to find specific creative endeavors

Tags

So far, there doesn’t appear to have been a major impact from tags. I have two theories why they haven’t made much difference yet. First is low initial adoption. We saw low adoption of the Communities feature, and tags are something that have to be set periodically instead of permanently like communities. Second is the current user base isn’t used to browsing with tags. I can’t remember the last time I used the search bar to find anything on Twitch, but newcomers are used to googling, and tags makes search much more useful. I think the impact of tags will be more of a slow build because of this.

Unfortunately I’m not able to dive much deeper into why at the moment, because tag data only became publicly available mid-November. I’m curious to see what usage statistics end up being, and whether there’s a discoverability difference in Creative vs the rest of Twitch.

No graphs for this section due to lack of data availability. Creative has stayed fairly consistent close to 1% of all viewership on Twitch

While not exactly a golden age for creative arts on Twitch, it’s heartening to see changes helping us out. There are still a lot of steps needed to see Creative really succeed on Twitch, but the new discovery features was one step in the right direction.

If you have any questions or comments, I’d love to hear them. You can find me on Twitter here.