This article was updated on Friday, 22nd of March, 2024 to better reflect the current Stream Hatchet product offerings and replace outdated images. The original post was published on the 17th of June, 2021.
The explosive growth of live streaming and broader gaming culture was heavily fueled by the pandemic shutdown. This surge has driven marketers to leverage game streamers globally to reach digitally native audiences.
Stream Hatchet’s Q1 2021 Report discovered a significant increase in live hours watched on Twitch, YouTube Gaming, and Facebook Gaming, resulting in an 80% increase year-over-year. Although the shutdown is slowly ending, live streaming platforms are continually gaining new viewers.
Global Impact of Live Streaming
While marketers often associate the most significant gaming audiences with players in North America, Australia has emerged as a major region for both esports and gaming culture. Recently, Consultancy, an advisory firm, reported that Australia’s gaming industry grew to $3.4 billion during Covid-19.
In the context of streaming, YouTube Gaming’s Australian streamers generated a total of 75.71M hours watched in 2020, an increase of 357% from 2019.
The Channel Searcher tool, accessible through Stream Hatchet’s Essentials and Pro platforms, allows users to generate reports on a collective group of streamers across several live streaming platforms, broadcasting simultaneously. This simplifies the time-consuming process of gathering data, granting marketers faster campaign insights.
Regarding Australia’s top streamers, Channel Searcher can break down the individual team member metrics – revealing YouTube Gaming influencer LazarBeam had the top peak viewership at 171K for Q1 2021.
Additionally, this detailed Channel Searcher overview shows YouTube Gaming is the platform the majority of these Australian streamers use. During Q3 of 2020, Stream Hatchet reported YouTube Gaming experienced the strongest growth of live streaming platforms, with an increase of more than 150M hours watched from Q2. Thus, streamers have become more comfortable branching out from Twitch to explore what other live-streaming platforms offer.
Context is Key
In the context of “top streamer” it’s important to note airtime. Stream Hatchet’s platform can break down viewership further by quarter, month, week, and even day.
Twitch content creator Quin69 streamed the longest out of the top 5 Australian streamers. More airtime can greatly impact hours watched, which is why considering other streaming metrics is equally important. Airtime affects not just hours watched of the individual streamer but also the top games for this breakdown.
A more in-depth look at the data shows Path of Exile is played exclusively by Quin69 (seen on the Channel Searcher platform tool) and the over 8M hours watched was also produced exclusively by him. Therefore, this data point is not a trend of Australian streamers as a whole.
Essential Data at Your Fingertips
Stream Hatchet’s focused on connecting real time data to trends across the gaming world, with the goal of maximizing content insights across the video games and esports industry. Our new Essentials platform is robustly built with the key tools for running marketing activations on live streaming platforms.
Stream Hatchet’s Essentials platform can:
- Monitor the top channels across all major live streaming platforms
- Pull detailed metrics from specified channels
- Measure viewership in aggregate by building custom lists of channels
Ready to enhance your go-to marketing strategy with Stream Hatchet? Begin your free trial today.
