With our time within community groups to support Twitch streamers, we’ve noticed that there are a significant number of people who are not quite sure what information the stream summary is providing. If you’re looking for a guide to understanding your stream summary or your insights, we’ve put together this short guide to help you get the most out of your Twitch data.
Importantly, you should remember that these stats don’t necessarily need to be high. Streaming in Twitch is a hobby shared by millions of people around the world, whether they are sharing their journey with gaming, music, art, crafting or even just chatting.
Your Stream Summary
Stream summaries are really useful for helping you to identify where streams are falling down, and how to boost your stream growth. There are a lot of quite simple data points here, such as the data and time of your stream, the total stream duration, new followers and new subscriptions.
Some of the other pieces of data can be a little more ambiguous though. What’s the difference between average, unique and max viewers, and why are live views different?
Average Viewers – This is the average number of people who were watching your stream at the same time. This can go up and down throughout your stream, of course, and Twitch takes an average across the whole stream.
Max Viewers – This is the highest number of concurrent viewers you had at any time within the stream. Think of it as your stream’s peak popularity. The Max Viewers number is when the highest number of people were there with you at the same time.
Unique Viewers – As you might guess from the title, unique viewers doesn’t count every view your stream gets, but the number of identified people. So CoolViewer15 could watch your stream, leave for a while and then come back again, but would still only be counted once. Unique viewers are almost certainly to be higher than your Max Viewers number, because Unique Viewers do not all have to be there at the same time.
Unique Chatters – This number is taken from the pool of Unique Viewers, and counts only those who have left a message in your chat. So if CoolViewer15 sends 20 chat messages, and YourSubscriber09 sends 5 messages, this number would be 2.
Live Views – Live Views does count when people go out and come back in. This means that Unique Viewers (for this stat) will be counted twice if they leave and then return. So if CoolViewer15 watched, left and then came back, Unique Viewers would be 1, but Live Views would be 2.
Your stream summary will also (if viewed online) break down the views by platform, location and source. This will allow you to see where your users are coming from, and how they are finding your channel. This can be incredibly important for finding where you could reach more people, and what methods of advertising your channel are already working well for you.
Calculating Average Viewers
There are also some slightly incorrect ideas milling around online, regarding how Twitch calculates the Average Viewers stat. Some think that this takes the live or unique view count and then divides by the number of hours, and other similar concepts which don’t give a true view of how this works. It’s actually fairly granular, and works through point-in-time data snapshots, rather than an overall total.
Twitch doesn’t define their “point in time”, but we figure this will be every few minutes or so, while you are live streaming. Data is recorded for that moment in time, which lists the number of concurrent viewers at that point. Twitch then rolls up all of those snapshots, and divides by the number of moments. This gives a much more accurate average than totalling live views and dividing by the hours you streamed.
So, for example, let’s say we have a stream of (to keep things simple) ten minutes. This would need ten “point-in-time” snapshots of your current live viewer count. We’ll say that this might look something like:
Minute 1: 6 viewers
Minute 2: 6 viewers
Minute 3: 8 viewers
Minute 4: 9 viewers
Minute 5: 8 viewers
Minute 6: 13 viewers
Minute 7: 20 viewers
Minute 8: 14 viewers
Minute 9: 7 viewers
Minute 10: 6 viewers
We first take all of those concurrent viewer numbers and add them together. 6+6+8+9+8+13+20+14+7+6 = 97. We then divide that by the number of point in time recordings we have (we’ve assumed ten points over a ten minute period). So our total of 97 viewers comes down to an average of 9.7 concurrent viewers across the whole stream.