I recently stumbled upon a site called TwitchTracker, which gives you some statistical information about your favorite Twitch channels. And as I am currently interested in some games which have very few streams and viewers, I am watching some streams where there are only a handful of other people watching. And to my surprise, when I enter those channels into TwitchTracker, it turns out that these are already the more successful Twitch channels out there. A channel with an average number of 5 viewers is already in the top 5%, and it takes only a bit over 10 viewers on average for each of your streams to be in the top 1%. The median number of viewers seems to be around 1, which is to say that there are a *lot* of channels with typically no viewers at all. The average number of viewers is 27.7, but the distribution is extremely uneven, with the most successful streamers having thousands of viewers, which seriously distorts the average.

There is a hierarchy of Twitch streamers, where the 60k most successful ones are partners, the 2 million moderately successful ones are affiliates, and 14 million streamers are non-affiliates, which means they don't have an average of 3 viewers and 50 followers. But when you open Twitch, you don't even see those small channels. The recommendation algorithm will always propose the more successful channels. You need to follow a specific game, and then scroll down the current streams for that game to find the small channels.

So, while I definitively missed the switch from blogging to modern forms of "influencing", I think I will stick with the written word. I am more comfortable with the written word. And it seems that it would take a long time and a lot of streams playing to no audience before a Twitch channel of mine would be as successful as my relatively quiet blog is.