A study on Channel Popularity in Twitch

In the past few decades, there has been an increasing need for Internet users to host real time events online and to share their experiences with live, interactive audiences. Online streaming services like Twitch have attracted millions of users to stream and to spectate. There have been few studies about the prediction of streamers' popularity on Twitch. In this paper, we look at potential factors that can contribute to the popularity of streamers. Streamer data was collected through consistent tracking using Twitch's API during a 4 weeks period. Each user's streaming information such as the number of current viewers and followers, the genre of the stream etc., were collected. From the results, we found that the frequency of streaming sessions, the types of content and the length of the streams are major factors in determining how much viewers and subscribers streamers can gain during sessions.