Twitch Creative’s Growth Problem
Should Creative streamers jump to IRL?
Creative on Twitch is exceptional because it is about helping and encouraging others. Despite this defining quality, Creative is still a minor part of Twitch, and Creative streamers are struggling to grow. I have the numbers that show the quality of the Creative community, and outlines the dilemma Creative streamers face in choosing how to grow their streams.
Creative is easier to moderate
Streamers (and their moderators) control what kind of community they foster within their stream. However, each game category has its own community as well. Many streamers I know view the IRL community as lower quality, particularly compared to the Creative community. One of the ways to see if there is a difference is to look at how often viewers get banned.
I looked at how many viewers received a moderation action per hour of stream (timeouts under 5 minutes excluded), and I found the rate of timeouts/bans when streaming in IRL to be about 3x higher than when streaming in Creative after controlling for average viewer levels.
Each timeout and ban takes its toll on the chat experience of other viewers. It also takes a mental toll on the streamer, and detracts from what many truly want to do: build a community they love.
Creative is more engaged as a community
One of my favorite things about Creative is how welcoming the community is, and how streamers do so much to support their fellow casters. I wanted to be able to back up these assertions about the Creative community, so I looked at an indication of community building: hosts.
One of the most powerful tools a streamer has is the end of stream host. A way to support, promote, and share communities all rolled into one. Hosting in my opinion is a good indicator of community engagement and community support. So I looked at how likely a Creative streamer was to end their stream with a host compared to an IRL streamer. Streamers I identified as primarily streaming Creative hosted far more often than streamers I identified as primarily streaming IRL.
An example to illustrate the difference: If I expect an IRL streamer to host 36% of the time, I would expect a similar Creative streamer to host 58% of the time. One of the reasons Twitch has embraced things like hosts and raids is because they can make a big difference, especially for smaller streamers. In my view, this contrast in behavior really illustrates the difference between Creative and IRL streamers.
Creative has more positive chats
Chat sentiment is a measure of how positive or negative the chat is overall. Words like “excited” or “SeemsGood” make the chat more positive while “disappointed” and “DansGame” make the chat more negative. There’s clearly a lot of variation in this, but on balance, I found Creative streams to be more positive than IRL streams.
This might be due to the kind of community the streamers fostered more than the community around the categories, because there wasn’t much of a difference between Creative/IRL for the same streamer.
Monetization trends with growth, not category
While money should not be the main concern behind streaming, full-time streamers can’t afford to ignore it, and there are many artists where Twitch is an important source of revenue and advertising for their work.
The most consistent source of revenue on Twitch is subs. A difference in new subs can be a big deal because of that. I compared the rate of subs gained during IRL and Creative streams (regular and prime), and didn’t find a significant difference. This didn’t change when I added gifted subs either.
I also looked at the other monetization method Twitch offers: bits. This followed a similar methodology as subs, and again after adjusting for average viewer levels, I didn’t find a significant difference in the rate of cheered bits.
While I wouldn’t expect subs or bits to be any different in Creative or IRL, The big caveat is that there’s no difference after adjusting for average viewer levels. If a streamer can grow faster in one category or the other, that could impact these monetization options. And there is a huge difference in potential opportunity.
There’s arguments to be had about big fish in a small pond or vice versa, but capped growth can mean capped revenue. The good news is the kind of viewers around Creative or IRL won’t impact your revenue. The bad news is the problem is the same one nearly all creative streamers have been struggling with: how to continue to grow their streams.
What to do about it
I wish I had a clear answer to the best way forward for a Creative streamer, but there isn’t one. I hope this outlines the tradeoffs of streaming in Creative vs IRL, but the impacts I found are going to vary from streamer to streamer, so the right choice to make will vary as well.
Twitch of course has a major focus on discovery, and you can keep up with updates on the Discovery Trello. I’m really excited to see how it plays out in helping Creative streamers. But I don’t think extra discovery features will be the golden key to Creative really flourishing on Twitch. It’s become clear to me that the adoption and use of discovery features like hosting and the communities feature in Creative far outstrips their use anywhere else on the platform. Despite this, Creative is still a small portion of Twitch with many viewers not even knowing art streams are a thing.
Twitch has ambitions beyond game streaming, but they have really struggled with adapting the company to go beyond gaming. Creative already has a dedicated community around it that wants the same thing Twitch does. It took a lot of work to become the dominant stream service in gaming, and it’ll take a lot of work to do the same in other areas. Without investing resources these expansions aren’t going to be very successful. But they have an existing community that wants to help, and I would encourage Twitch to leverage it.
If you have any questions or comments, I’d love to hear them. You can find me on Twitter here. Cover art is owned by Stevieraedrawn, and you can find her on Twitter here.
