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
So twitch is mostly lonely people trying to find some company?
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
It’s mostly people streaming into the void.
Interesting that so many watch small streamers, it is much more wide than other media
