If you're a Twitch streamer, it can be very difficult to figure out where you stand and to have proper perspective. And you're going to be amazed how few viewers you actually need to have more viewers than most other people on the platform. So I'm going to say it plainly: it's not that hard to hit the top 20 on Twitch. And I hope this helps you feel better about your live stream. I know other platforms like Facebook and TikTok are quick to show you big, huge numbers, but in my experience viewers on Twitch are the highest quality. It's better to have a smaller amount of high quality viewers than it is to have a bunch of people just scrolling by, where you can't even really tell who actually cares.
How Many Live Viewers Do You Really Need?
So here's the question: how many live viewers do you think you need to have on Twitch to have more than 82% of the channels streaming? This is a statistic I saw that shocked me, because I recently switched over from YouTube. And while I'm doing this live right now on my Twitch, I'm also recording it and putting it up on YouTube 24 hours after the live stream.
The answer is you only need 10 viewers. Now, this statistic is based on the actual channels live and the actual viewers, so it will go up and down slightly. But you only need 10 people watching to have more viewers than 80% of streamers on Twitch. And I'm going to show you where this statistic comes from and analyze it in more detail.
This is a statistic off of twitchstrike.com. When you look at it, these are all the channels on Twitch right now, and there's a place where you put in your average viewers. If I put in my average viewers on my Twitch channel from the last week and a half, 10 or 11 is what I've had. Now, after I got used to having hundreds of live viewers on Facebook and about the same on YouTube, I felt like 10 viewers on Twitch really sucked. But what I didn't realize is that most channels on Twitch have one viewer.
One viewer, and that's usually the person themselves streaming. One viewer is the most common number, the single largest amount of streams on Twitch. If I just sampled a random stream on Twitch, there's a 39% chance, at least right this second, that the most likely result would be a channel with one viewer. The next most common is two, and the next most, predictably, is three. If you have one, you ought to at least be watching your own channel yourself; your own channel should be up on a preview window or something. And two viewers is pretty much you and your wife, or your mom, or your brother, somebody you know who has got your stream up. So most channels on Twitch do not even have more than two people watching. And in most cases that means there's not more than one person actually watching who doesn't know the streamer personally. The majority of streams on Twitch don't even have anybody outside the community watching them.
Why Perspective Matters
Now you're wondering, well, why are you talking about this? I'm telling you this because I want you to have better perspective on what else is happening on Twitch. This stat really helped me, because a week ago I was feeling like my channel wasn't good enough. I was feeling like, man, my channel kind of sucks, there's not that many people watching. And then I looked at this stat and I'm like, really? You have more people watching than 82% of other streamers and you're saying your channel sucks? No, it's your point of view that sucks. That's what sucks.
And this is why the threshold for Twitch affiliate is three. The threshold for affiliate is having an average of three viewers, because most channels don't even have an average of three viewers. If you go further and you want to be in the top 10% on Twitch, you'll see each of these is like a percent or half a percent. If you update it to around 24 or 25 viewers, that's all you need to be in the top 10%. So if you have 24 viewers on Twitch, you're doing better than 90% of channels. And if you're up in the hundreds, you're doing better than 96% of Twitch channels.
One of the most difficult things about streaming is having proper perspective. Imagine if you had a hundred people in your living room watching you play video games. That'd kind of be a lot, wouldn't it? I actually turn the view counter off; I can't see how many people are watching my live stream. If you're watching, you can see it, but I personally don't, because it doesn't matter to me whether I've got one viewer, 10, a hundred, or a thousand. The show should be just as good. The show should be just the same. I've had all of those. And this is what you need to know: if you take 20 randomly sampled streamers on Twitch, only one would actually have a hundred people watching.
This should also make clear the relative difficulty. If you've got three viewers, you're doing better than 57% of Twitch channels. It shows you how truly challenging it can be. And with proper perspective, you'll find life much easier. This has helped me see that if I've got 10 people watching on average most of the time, I'm good. I don't need to endlessly struggle to try and climb higher and higher. If I put on a great show every day for 10 people who are live the whole time, so that every time one comes in and one goes out it stays around 10, that's great. I upload it to YouTube, get a few hundred more views, and that's plenty. If you're struggling with your Twitch channel, this is a statistic that I hope will make a big difference for you. If you want to go deeper on this kind of thing with me, the best way to work with me today is to join my community in the Jerry Banfield Family, where we talk through exactly this.
Ask Yourself Why You Want More
And if you want to get these numbers up, think about why. Why do you want more people to take their very valuable time and energy and put it into your Twitch channel? On my Twitch channel, my goal is that every time you come here, you feel better when you leave than when you got here. That could happen because you learned something, or because you had a laugh, or because you connected with somebody else. That's why my streams are worth it. But I also see that my streams are not worth it for everybody. In fact, most people in the world should not be hanging out on one of my live streams right now. This is kind of a niche, very specific thing. And I trust that if I love what I do, put clips out on YouTube, and show up every day on Twitch, I'll get the right amount of growth. I don't have to struggle or feel bad.
In some ways, the streamers that are bigger are sicker. There's one stream that has 76,000 viewers, and you can see every different viewer count on this site. In some ways the biggest streamers are the most sick and sad. Not all of them, but some are just purely there in a bad place. I guarantee you probably half of these streams right now with thousands and thousands of people watching don't feel like they have enough people watching. Isn't that crazy? And you can tell, because they're just grinding, doing whatever they can to get views, constantly counting how many subs they have even though they make hundreds of thousands of views. They have sub goals and are constantly trying to pull new subs in, asking you to follow and go over here and do this and do that. Don't be sad like that. Appreciate where you're at. If you want to see more of how I think about this, I put a lot of it into my YouTube Coaching playlist.
If you're doing better than most, the focus should be how to help people have fun and give back every day. So I appreciate you watching this little part of the Twitch stream. Appreciate where you're at, put on a great show for whoever shows up, and trust that the right growth will follow.