Twitch is slowly but deliberately evolving its creator model, widening access to monetization tools that once made it a haven for smaller, community-driven streamers.The Amazon-owned live-streaming platform just announced changes to this model that let more creators access its monetization tools. The product tweaks are aimed at a long-running imbalance: according to its 2025 recap, the platform logged billions of hours watched (it did not specify how many, but a rep confirmed it was a 40% increase year-over-year) with more than 21 million active streamers worldwide. But much of that viewership is still concentrated amongst Twitch’s top streamers.
“Twitch has always been a top-heavy platform given its lack of discoverability and a format that pushes viewers to streams that have higher viewership,” political streamer Austin “Gremloe” MacNamara told Digiday.
Twitch does not provide regular metrics in terms of viewership, and how it’s broken down across streamers. That means streamers, marketers, and journalists rely on third-party measuring services like SullyGnome, a statistics and analytics service for Twitch, that accesses the platform’s API, collecting information every five minutes and aggregating it daily, sometimes hourly.
