Throughout this month, we’ve prepared many Q3 articles on various subsets of streamers. Whether it is Twitch IRL streamers, Twitch Gaming streamers, or even the fastest-growing streamers, the rankings are always extremely international and quite rarely topped by English-speaking creators. Now, we will look at the performance of English-speaking content across multiple live-streaming platforms in Q3.
For this data, we chose four live-streaming platforms to analyse: Twitch, YouTube Gaming, Kick, and Rumble. Twitch and YouTube Gaming are two of the most-watched platforms in the world, and Kick and Rumble offer an insight into smaller live-streaming platforms, both of which are undergoing some of the fastest growth in the industry.
As we looked at in our Q3 live-streaming landscape article, YouTube Live is the biggest live-streaming platform in the world. However, YouTube Gaming is only accountable for 16.6% of the total watch time accumulated by YouTube Live. Kick and Rumble are the two platforms to experience the largest growth in Q3, achieving 52.6% and 224.76% growth in watch time compared to Q2, respectively.
We have collected data on the total viewership of English-speaking content on these platforms, data on channel distribution when grouped by Average Viewers, and dynamics for the daily watch time statistics of each platform. Firstly, let’s compare the total watch time of English-speaking content on each platform.
Viewership of each platform in Q3
Twitch was the most successful of all platforms for viewership of English-language content, and the purple platform achieved 2.236B Hours Watched in Q3. Naturally, this figure is lower than the total watch time achieved by all content on Twitch for the same period, but YouTube Gaming suffered much more when only English-speaking content was accounted for.
As documented in our live-streaming landscape article for Q3, YouTube Gaming achieved 27% of the total watch time collected by Twitch during the quarter. However, when only English-language content is considered, YouTube Gaming could only achieve 16% of the total watch time reached by Twitch. This statistical change highlights how popular non-English-language content is on YouTube Gaming.
In contrast to Twitch, Rumble’s data shows an almost monolithic dependence on English-language content. More than 93% of Rumble’s watch time was derived from English-language content. This is reflected in the top streamers of the platform, as you can see in our September Rumble recap: all top creators on the platform were exclusively English-speaking and mostly from the United States of America.
Read also: YouTube Gaming Streamers Rankings of Q3 2023
By using the Games and Categories page of Streams Charts, we can take a look and what was the most popular English-language content for each platform in Q3. For Twitch, Just Chatting was the top category of the platform, although various games like Valorant, League of Legends, and Grand Theft Auto V were among the top categories. On Kick, Just Chatting was also the top category, although Slots & Casinos was more popular than any gaming category on the platform.
YouTube Gaming makes use of an all-encompassing Gaming category, where most of the viewership stems from. However, many mobile games like Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, Garena Free Fire, and Battlegrounds Mobile India were responsible for a large proportion of the platform’s English viewership.
For a more in-depth look at the streamers which make up this watch time for each platform, we can turn to the distribution of channels on each platform by Average Viewers.
Distribution of channels by Average Viewers
For this graphic, we grouped all the streamers who contributed to the platforms’ watch time in Q3 and divided them into their respective Average Viewers brackets. One immediately striking piece of information is that 91.39% of all channels with less than 100 Average Viewers were streaming on Twitch.
This data does not necessarily imply that streamers on Twitch are less likely to receive significant viewership, but rather that streamers who are beginning their career are more likely to choose Twitch as a starting point. Only 0.05% of streamers with fewer than 100 Average Viewers were broadcasting on Rumble, highlighting that the platform is not where new streamers are beginning their careers.
YouTube Gaming and Twitch featured a stable distribution of viewership throughout their channels, whereas Rumble’s viewership was much more top-heavy than the previous two platforms. The 5K+ AV bracket made up 0.1% of YouTube Gaming and Kick’s total channel count, but for Rumble the top bracket accounted for 0.85% of total streamers. This figure was much smaller for Twitch, where 99.7% of all channels receive fewer than 100 AV.
Daily watch time dynamics of English-language content
Twitch generated the most watch time of any platform daily, and was generally consistent in its viewership. Only one day in the entirety of Q3 saw Twitch earn less than 20M HW, July 19. This day did record below-average airtime and channels live, however, other days in July recorded even fewer channels live but still managed to record more than 20M+ HW.
Twitch’s most successful day for viewership was August 26, when the purple platform achieved 27.75M Hours Watched in one day. This day achieved significant watch time thanks to special events in gaming conferences, and esports events in various disciplines, such as CS:GO, Valorant, and League of Legends.
Read also: Most popular streamers from North America — Q3 2023
YouTube Gaming enjoyed a similar boost in viewership thanks to esports events, and the most-watched channels of its peak day were esports events. YouTube Gaming accumulated 5.78M Hours Watched on July 29, largely thanks to coverage of Mobile Legends: Bang Bang events. Whereas Twitch’s most successful day for coverage was dominated by traditional esports disciplines, YouTube Gaming was boosted by the new wave of mobile gaming esports.
Kick’s most successful day, July 1, did not seem to benefit from any special events or specific changes to the platform. Around this time, streamers such as xQc and Amouranth were moving to Kick, but neither of these creators was live on this day. Streamers who usually received lower viewership received explosive growth on this day, and the second-most-watched streamer of the day experienced a 909% growth in watch time compared to his usual viewership.
Rumble’s peak came at the opposite end of Q3, as it reached 2.65M Hours Watched on September 28. This was thanks to the second GOP Primary debate, a huge news day for the largely American and often times politically-focused platform. If you’re curious about the viewership statistics of channels that covered this debate, we covered this event in an article at the time.
In summary, Twitch was by far the most popular option for English-speaking live-streamers in Q3 of 2023. YouTube Gaming is still preferred by a more international audience, and English-language content makes up roughly only one-quarter of the total viewership for the platform. Although Kick and Rumble are largely English-language based, these platforms do not have a comparable audience size to the other two platforms. If you’re curious about the viewership statistics of other platforms or want to dive into this topic deeper, check out our Platforms page.