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[OC] The top 1% of live Twitch channels get 65% of the viewers, and the median channel has 2 (lemmy.zip)
submitted 4 days ago by to c/dataisbeautiful@lemmy.world
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Source: Twitch Helix API (Get Streams). On Nov 2, 2026 at 18:35 UTC I read every live stream once (1,154 requests, a few minutes) and kept only the viewer counts, no names. 115,161 channels were live with 3,160,515 viewers. Tool: node-canvas (JavaScript), drawn by hand, no chart library.

What surprised me:

  • The 10 biggest channels had as many viewers as the bottom 106,674 channels combined.
  • The most common viewer count is exactly 1: 41,198 channels, 36% of everyone live. My guess is that many of those are the streamer's own second screen.
  • 1 in 10 live channels had nobody watching at all.
  • 427 viewers was enough to be in the top 1,000, and 24 viewers put you in the top 10,000.

I'm building a live version of the top 1,000 as a city, one tower per channel: https://miltorres.com/?ref=lemmy-oc-reparto

Chart of every live Twitch channel at one moment (115,161 channels, Nov 2, 2026, 18:35 UTC). Two stacked bars compare share of channels and share of viewers by rank: the top 1,000 channels are 0.87% of channels but get 63.6% of viewers. Below, a histogram of viewers per channel: 41,198 channels have exactly 1 viewer, 11,330 have none, and only 29 have more than 10,000.

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[–] 19 points 4 days ago (2 children)

So twitch is mostly lonely people trying to find some company?

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 day ago

    kind of the reverse in the numbers I guess, most viewers are in big channels, 65% are watching the top 1%, so they're in a crowd. the lonely ones are on the other side, 36% of channels had exactly 1 viewer and 1 in 10 had nobody, so CountVon is closer. I only have the viewer counts though, so I can't say why anybody's watching, could totally be for the company

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    • [–] 3 points 4 days ago

    Interesting that so many watch small streamers, it is much more wide than other media

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