[Annual Demographics Survey] Results & Discussion
Marstead
(Note that Andrea didn't take the Demographics survey)
Given the worldwide Twitch demographics and the fact that I rely almost totally on walk-ins for exposure, it makes sense that our community is predominantly male. It's still a little disappointing -- the dream would be a ~50/50 split.
We've had a lot of positive experiences working with women streamers in the past, and I think our community isn't unwelcoming to women. I think the male domination is just a symptom of the fact that the folks browsing Twitch in the first place (who could potentially stumble on my channel) are predominantly male.
YouTube's statistics aren't posted here, but globally and locally to my channel they are almost identical. So I think it's the same problem over there; generally, men are searching for game videos on YouTube more frequently than women, so it's more likely for men to discover the stream.
I do want to be careful here -- there's a similar situation in graduate-level STEM programs. University officials will tell you that the lack of women in graduate programs is not a problem, because it matches the number of women in undergrad and high school who are focused on the sciences. This is the "leaky pipe" problem, and their argument is that the pipe is leaking as far back as elementary school, and needs to be patched there before we can reach parity at the graduate level. But there could still be leaks in the pipe at the graduate level--we just won't know until the earlier leaks are patched. Similarly, if the global Twitch demographics ever approach 50/50 representation, but our channel remains male-dominated, that's when I would start to worry.
While not unexpected, I think this is the most striking result from the public demographics part of the survey. Twitch users are predominantly very young -- almost 60% of global Twitch viewers are under 25. Meanwhile, 66% of our audience is over 25. I think this is reflected in the general mature atmosphere of the stream, and it's one of our bigger draws as a channel, both to older Twitch viewers and to more mature younger viewers. This also explains our abnormally high Patreon subscriber to average concurrent viewer ratio (more people subscribe than are actually able to concurrently watch!)
We might need to accept that the channel might be unattractive to younger viewers. When we do get a kid joining the channel, their behavior is really striking and obvious to everyone else, and even them just acting like a kid (seeking attention) can derail stuff a little bit. I don't think anyone in chat is hostile toward kids in this way, and I don't think we're actively uninviting. It's just a product of our atmosphere. And I still know kids who are mature enough to enjoy our sort of discussion. I'm not sure that this is really a problem -- I'd personally rather get one adult or mature kid as a regular than 10 spammy attention seekers.
The dream would be to get some kids and, through our channel atmosphere, help with their growth. To be a bastion of positive influence. But in reality, it's more likely these kids will walk in, see the sort of atmosphere we have, and walk right out. I don't think there's much we can do to change that without radically altering the stream format.
To the regulars under 24 who have stuck around on the channel -- you rock!
Question 3: In what country do you currently reside?
A reminder that this comparison is just for fun, ~25 data points can't compare reasonably to ~10-20 million.
Our fraction of viewers from the United States isn't terribly far from the global market. A big chunk of this is just that there are a lot of people living in the US compared to other countries. Interestingly, only one continental European country charts in the top 10 globally for Twitch, and at less than 1% of total viewers. But ~20% of our regulars are European. I would guess this has everything to do with our stream schedule overlapping with European prime time and nerdy late night viewing, but running mostly through the work day in the US.
Question 4: Which of the following describes your relationship & parental status?
Note that there's no Twitch data for this -- there is a report about "Children in your household" that reflects a shocking 55% affirming. But given that ~25% of Twitch viewers would count as those "children", it's not a good comparison for what we were asking.
It looks like the majority of our community is single. It's too bad that I don't have the Twitch statistics for this one because I think it would be interesting to compare. If I had to guess I'd hazard married & cohabiting folks are generally more busy, and since Twitch is an interactive platform, they generally have less time to interact with it. So I think this is similar to the Gender question -- I would guess there are more single people on the platform in general, and since I rely mostly on Games Browser walk-in traffic to get new regulars, we're exposed to a higher percentage of single viewers. But I don't actually have data to support any of that, so who knows!
Question 5: What is the highest level of school/degree you've completed?
When I first started streaming my audience was seeded with a lot of my friends attending graduate school pursuing their physics PhDs along with Andrea at the Ohio State University. These results tell me some of those folks didn't take this survey :D
Beyond that quirk, our education make-up is similar to the global average.
Question 6: How much total combined money did your household earn last year?
>50% of respondents selected "Prefer not to answer" on this question, which surprised me. Because of that, we don't really have enough data points to say anything interesting about this. The remaining reports generally match the Twitch average. Since most of our audience is sensitive to reporting this kind of information (money is the Final Social Taboo), I won't be including this question in future demographics surveys.
Question 7: What is your ethnicity?
Our average here isn't too far off from Twitch's global demographics, so this is similar to the gender question. The common lesson I'm learning from this survey is that if we rely exclusively on Twitch's Games Browser for exposure to grow the channel, our audience can only be as diverse as the global Twitch audience.
I'd definitely like to see increased diversity in the community and I'm hopeful that we're seen as welcoming to everybody. Although our community is predominantly single, white, & male, I'm happy to report that we've never had any explicit cases of racism from regulars, and only a handful of borderline cases of sexism. But that doesn't mean we should ignore this data.
I think that seeing that the majority of the community is made up of white males means we should be especially careful to continue enforcing existing rules about racism, sexism, and productive/topical discussion of politics/religion. I don't think this because white men are automatically more racist or sexist. Rather, we're less likely to be affected by issues impacting women & minorities, and we're therefore implicitly more likely to be silent on them. Not because we're bad or malicious, but because we're ignorant: we just don't know what it's like.
Racism & Sexism do actually come up as plot points (or bad design/narrative decisions) in a lot of video games, and so it's likely we'll continue to discuss them. Let's continue to have an atmosphere where people are comfortable speaking their mind on these subjects when they come up in games. And let's continue to be thoughtful about how we phrase our opinions in these areas. I don't want folks feeling like they're walking on eggshells and afraid to speak up, but I think we've done a good job of discussing these sorts of things with nuance rather than hyperbole, and we should keep that up.
Because we're vulnerable to implicit bias, it's the "minor" issues that are most likely to have a negative impact--the sorts of things you'd feel uncomfortable bringing up publicly. If there's anything that comes up in stream that you think might be unwelcoming/uninviting to women or minorities, no matter how minor, please send me a direct message on Discord so I can follow up.
Question 8: What is your employment status?
The results on this one weren't terribly interesting, and we don't have statistics to compare against globally for Twitch--I probably won't use this question in future Demographics surveys. The biggest trends were that ~30% of our audience work full time, and another ~30% attends school full-time. Because of our schedule, by far the biggest factor for viewer & subscriber attrition right now is change in employment. Different jobs have different environments that are more or less friendly to Twitch, and since our schedule overlaps with working/school hours in most of the US, transitioning from school to the workplace or changing jobs is very likely to impact whether people are able to tune into the channel at all.
I'll use this question to comment that if you're unable to watch regularly or subscribe anymore due to a change in employment or financial situation, you are 100% still welcome in the channel! We've had this discussion in our podcast that folks who are forced to cancel subscription to a Twitch channel are afraid to keep participating in the community. I do not want that to be the situation in our channel.
It's amazing that people are subscribing to make the channel happen at all, and if you must cancel or downgrade your pledge for any reason -- even if it drops us out of a pledge goal tier -- please do not hesitate to do so. At the end of the day, I implore you to do what is right for you, and only pledge if you can afford it. If your schedule prevents you from watching the stream most of the time, and watching live is really critical to you, I understand if the amount of content you're consuming doesn't jive with your pledge tier and you decide to cancel or downgrade.
Discussion about subscription status is a difficult thing to balance. I think it's absolutely correct to have a !subhype alert and for everyone to celebrate when a new person subscribes or donates, but I think that should be the end of discussion about other viewers' financial support of the stream. I don't think we should ever pressure viewers to subscribe, donate, or to change their pledge tier. We can inform folks of the benefits of subscribing but we should stop there ("Patreon subscribers get XYZ", not "You should subscribe so you get XYZ"). We shouldn't pry about viewers' financial situations and we shouldn't ask viewers why they dropped their subscription if they were forced to. It's clear from the income question in this survey that money is still very much a taboo subject for most of our viewers, so let's respect that.
Comments from Viewers
Here I'm discussing general comments from viewers regarding the public demographics info. I'll be going over stream-specific feedback & comments in the next post. We only received one comment in this area:
- I'd be curious about the percentage of LGBT people you have, but that's just because I'm a nerd about stuff like that. You do great man, you're by far my favorite streamer, and I have no complaints.
- Me too! I ran out of questions and wasn't able to ask this one, but I want to include it in next year's survey (I'll probably be switching survey platforms). As with the above gender/ethnicity questions, I am hopeful our atmosphere is inviting to LGBT viewers. The gaming community can be pretty toxic in this area, especially with a lot of younger viewers still using "gay" as a pejorative and generally being insensitive. Fortunately, I don't think we've seen any significant cases of homophobia in chat, although we may have occasionally strayed into "kink-shaming". For example, there's a pretty active furry community on Twitch, and we've hosted or been hosted by Creative streamers in the past who sometimes create furry art. The furry community is often a target for ridicule online, even among otherwise-tolerant folks, and I've seen jokes in chat at furries' expense. There are definitely video games out there which were created by or appeal to the furry community, and they are certain to come up in the context of certain games. We should make an effort to avoid being judgmental to groups of people in general. Thanks for the feedback!
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In conclusion, we are fairly in-line with the global Twitch average demographics, with the major notable exception of average age. We have no regulars under the age of 17, and wholly 60% of our audience is over 25.
The last two questions are specific to the channel and fairly big, so I'll be posting a separate thread on that data. Thanks everyone for participating!
-Dylan ("Marstead")
Marstead
It looks like the critical mass of folks are able to tune in near to the end of the stream, and the least people can make it right at the start. If you'll recall, before moving to New Mexico the schedule was built around an end time of 6PM PST (currently 5PM PST). Because Andrea gets home from work at ~5PM PST out here in New Mexico and everything in Los Alamos closes really early, we shifted the stream an hour earlier.
It's useful to know we spike at the end of the stream. I might try to explicitly schedule special events around this time to try to maximize viewership. We do get an advantage starting so early in that it is easier to get transcodes if fewer other people are streaming. We've had to fish a few times, but we haven't failed to get Transcodes since the new capacity was announced at TwitchCon.
Question 10: How do you watch the stream?
This question had really ugly formatting but I had to set it up that way because of the new SurveyMonkey limitations on free surveys. I'm going to be using a different service for the new survey because SurveyMonkey is much too restrictive now. Thank you all for bearing with this question, we got a lot of great feedback here.
I'll be displaying results from this question in subsections. I won't be giving specific numbers for each question, instead, you should read answers like this:
More Green = Viewers do this most (light green) or all of the time (dark green)
Yellow = Viewers do this 50% of the time
More Red = Viewers do this occasionally (light red) or not at all (dark red)
Question 10.1: Where?
~70% of responders never watch the stream at work, school, or when traveling. That's surprising! I thought we had significantly more folks who watched at work or school.
~30% is still a lot of people who still do watch when they're away. But it looks like the overwhelming majority watch at home, and no one responded that they "never" watch at home.
Question 10.2: Attention
This is another surprising result for me. I was expecting "With your full attention on the stream" to be a very low percentage, because that's how I watch Twitch streams -- I'll be busy working on stuff for the channel, multitasking in general, or otherwise doing something else and tabbing in when I hear something interesting happen. It does seem like just about everybody multitasks some of the time, which is to be expected. Twitch is less like a TV show where you want to give it your full attention and more like radio.
The bottom two options are "While AFK (with the stream playing)" and "While AFK (Logged into chat only)". I am happy to see that most folks who do watch AFK do so with the stream running. Even if you're not there to watch, if you can take the bandwidth hit, this is a big help for me. It helps me to get transcoding options and bumps up the concurrent viewers number, which helps drive more walk-in traffic. If you are only able to be AFK in chat and can't let the stream run, that's totally cool, but extra special thanks to those who can keep the stream up!
Question 10.3: Platform
I neglected to separate home computer/PC into Tower & Laptop, which might have been interesting. It looks like just about everyone watches on their computer, with only a few people bothering with Mobile. The feedback I've received is that Twitch Mobile kind of sucks for a lot of reasons.
Question 10.4: Engagement
Again, this is pretty surprising. I would have presumed more folks would watch sans video, audio, or chat, but it looks like most people watch with all 3.
The lurking to active chatting ratio seems about right to me, based on anecdotal evidence. I actually have the option in DeepBot to award an SP multiplier to active chatters, but I have it disabled because I don't want to disincentivize lurking (as I mentioned in the previous question, lurking helps a lot, and some people prefer to consume content that way). One of our most loyal viewers has over 900 hours watched and has never participated in chat while the stream was live, only occasionally voting off-stream.
The last two questions are "Simultaneously with other streams" and "Simultaneously with other video sources (Netflix, YT, etc)". It looks like half of viewers do occasionally run multiple streams at the same time, but for the most part, people have their full attention just on our channel.
Question 10.5: External Apps
Only one viewer uses an external application like Chatty to interact with Chat, which is interesting. I'll have to keep in mind that most viewers are using the native/browser Twitch chat. Since most viewers are watching at home on a PC, I do recommend checking out Chatty as an alternative to the browser chat if you are a frequent Twitch viewer. There's all sorts of customization you can do to make it easier to read, and you can even opt-out of !hide chat using it, if you're watching a game blind.
I'm pretty happy to see most viewers at least have Discord available, if not open all the time. Discord's the best way to get ahold of me, especially when the stream is offline, and it keeps the community running off-hours.
Question 10.6: VODs
The first question is "By watching pre-recorded VODs on Twitch" and the second is "...on YouTube". It looks like the majority of folks watch on YouTube rather than Twitch, which is my intent (for now -- we'll see if the VOD Uploads system becomes more robust in the future). It's apparent people don't watch VODs as their main way of consuming the stream. There's no one who participates in the channel solely through VODs. So I think this reinforces the idea that people really want Twitch to be live content, not just content that happened to have been recorded live at some point.
Only ~33% of viewers never look at VODs at all, so it seems like a good idea to keep that archive going (and it drives stream growth!)
Question 10.7: Audio
The last two questions are "With audio playing nearby (speakers)" and "With audio playing from across the room (living room TV, etc)".
This feedback helps me to target my audio testing. I test the stream audio before going live using Headphones, but it's difficult to get it right. It can be especially tough for blind games, where I don't want to venture too far into the game to see what the dynamic contrast is like, lest I spoil part of the opening for myself. Some games like Darkest Dungeon or Dark Souls are blaringly loud in the opening cutscenes but fairly quiet the rest of the time.
It's good to see most folks listen via Headphones when they can (you should get the best sound experience if you do this). If you do listen via speakers or across the room and have trouble hearing anything, please let me know. My goal is for both my voice and the game audio to be distinct and totally audible, and for one to never really drain out the other. If I do talk over voice acting, which I usually try to avoid if I can help it, you should be able to hear me rather than the VA (and I should always have subtitled activated to cover those cases).
Question 10.8: Friends & Family
The question here is "With a friend or family watching at the same time with you".
It looks like 66% of viewers only ever watch the stream alone. I might not be off the mark to compare this to the 70% of viewers who are single, never married. I wonder if all ~33% of folks who do watch with a friend or family member are typically doing so with their significant other. That would make sense -- I certainly haven't brought a friend over before and went like "hey let's watch this person on Twitch".
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I'll be making one last post to go over the general stream feedback from the end of the survey. Thanks again to everyone who participated, this is really helpful info!
Marstead
- I noticed that you always stream on the stream team "The Fallout Zone" but even though it seems to have a lot of members, it really doesn't seem to be a close-knit community. Have you maybe thought about creating a team/community that is more active with promoting each other? I have seen streamers have a ton of success with this recently, and it has allowed for VERY fast growth for some of them. Now that you have been streaming for a long time, it seems as though you have already done quite a bit a bit of networking, so why not use that to your advantage. A close stream team that always hosts one another (when possible), as well as promoting each other, has the benefit of connecting communities to create much larger ones. Why not put that type of system to work for you?
- I actually haven't been part of "The Fallout Zone" since around the end of 2015. This is a team my RL friend, a partnered streamer, created and invited me to. I noticed while I was in there that there was very little cross-talk between team members, and the conventional wisdom on /r/Twitch is that almost nobody uses teams to browse on Twitch. My RL friend ended up leaving the team (and no longer streams as part of one) so I left as well.
- Regarding creating a close-knit team, I would love to do this! We have a lot of streamers in the network we are quite close to. Unfortunately, team creation is restricted to partners only, and just about everyone in our network is either unpartnered or part of someone else's team. This'd be a goal once we do get partnered, although that is a distant future thing (Despite our crazy high number of subscribers--which some partnered streamers have told me is higher than what they average--Twitch is insisting on ~100 average concurrent viewers, and I don't see that happening for a long while).
- That said, if you find a stream team that would make sense for me to try to join, give me a heads-up. As far as I can tell the growth benefits of being in a team are just that you have a group of streamers that trade hosts, and that's something we're already doing. The "team" is just an organizing page to see who's part of the group, and not really a way for viewers to actively find streamers. But if you have a counter-example of a stream team that's really great at cross-promotion, that I'd be a good fit, and that growth would really stick, please give me a heads-up. In a future survey I might ask for feedback around hosting in general, as to my limited knowledge we have no major regulars/Patreon subscribers who discovered the channel via another channel hosting us (although I know for a fact we've sent some regulars to other channels, so it must be possible!)
- Whether I watch a VOD on Twitch or YouTube just depends on whether you've gotten around to uploading it to YT yet. If you have, I watch the YT video; if not, I go into the Twitch VODs.
- I usually try to upload VODs to YouTube overnight and have them ready for viewing the following morning. Sometimes we get a wrench in that (if I have a hard stop and have plans immediately after stream, or if there's a blocking copyright claim on the video as we recently experienced with Civilization V). This is the main reason I haven't disabled VOD Archiving on Twitch, so I'm glad folks are getting use out of those VODs. It's possible once the VOD Uploads system becomes robust that I will be deleting Twitch's automatically archived VODs and replacing them with uploaded versions. The plan then would be to keep VOD Archiving activated and wait to delete a video until I have a suitable upload to replace it. I don't plan to upload anything besides the Part 1 of each game series until the system improves, as adding anything other than that will greatly increase the amount of clutter.
- !catcam doesn't have enough cats in it.
- [My son] feels you don't cater enough to the cat watching audience. He would like Ben and Marty 24/7 plox.
- A third cat is not currently in the mix. I try to give chat a heads-up if I do see the kitties hanging out on the couch, which is like a 60% of the time thing. Feel free to continue to invoke !catcam if you want to take a gamble (it's generally pointed in the direction of where they take their naps).