Audience and Streamer Participation at Scale on Twitch
This study provides a foundational understanding of audience-streamer interaction dynamics for streamers, audiences, and platform designers on large-scale live streaming platforms like Twitch.
This paper analyzes 12 million chat messages and 45 hours of video from Twitch to understand audience-streamer interaction dynamics. It identifies five distinct stream types based on size and participation styles, ranging from small, intimate 'Clique Streams' to massive 'Professionals' with stadium-style audiences.
Large-scale streaming platforms such as Twitch are becoming increasingly popular, but detailed audience-streamer interaction dynamics remain unexplored at scale. In this paper, we perform a mixed-methods study on a dataset with over 12 million audience chat messages and 45 hours of streaming video to understand audience participation and streamer performance on Twitch. We uncover five types of streams based on size and audience participation styles: Clique Streams, small streams with close streamer-audience interactions; Rising Streamers, mid-range streams using custom technology and moderators to formalize their communities; Chatter-boxes, mid-range streams with established conversational dynamics; Spotlight Streamers, large streams that engage large numbers of viewers while still retaining a sense of community; and Professionals, massive streams with the stadium-style audiences. We discuss challenges and opportunities emerging for streamers and audiences from each style and conclude by providing data-backed design implications that empower streamers, audiences, live streaming platforms, and game designers