New Feature on Twitch: Shared Viewership
From now on streamers will easily collaborate and grow their communities on Twitch – great news! While it's designed to unite communities, it could be doing the opposite. Entyx plays a key role in helping brands and streamers navigate this new collaborative landscape. Let’s break it down.
What is Shared Viewership?
Shared Viewership allows two or more streamers to combine their audiences into a single chat room during collaborations. It's a new metric in the Guest Star and Shared Chat feature set, aiming to display in real-time the total unique count of concurrent viewers across all collaborating channels and basically merging communities for a truly united experience.
Shared Viewership gives creators complete freedom to track their collaborations' total reach and see their streams' rankings. The feature is displayed both on discovery surfaces and streamers' channel pages.
Why did Twitch integrate SV?
The goal is to give streamers a much more accurate image of the scale and dynamics of their co-steams.
Streamers will get basically additional analytics based on which they can attract new sponsors. Moreover, the viewership count on Shared Chat reflects the communities that are available to interact with streamers at any given moment. The size of the visible Viewership directly influences how participants interact overall (remember that smaller streams differ from large ones with thousands of chatters and viewers).
Viewers win new interesting content in their recommendations. Also they clearly understand whether the stream is worthy of joining before engaging based on the viewership count and visible nature of the stream.
Twitch’s New Metrics
Discovery.
It will be displayed on all Twitch discovery surfaces and impact stream position when sorting by Viewership because it is the most genuine representation of what a viewer can expect to experience when they join a stream.
Analytics (Coming Soon).
It will also provide creators with enhanced analytics to understand the total reach of their collaborative efforts and impact after each stream, which can be valuable for sponsorships and other opportunities. In the future Twitch plan to add these metrics to Stream Summaries.
Note: Shared Viewership will not impact the Path to Partner or the number of people who see ads on the streamer's channel.
The Basic Rules of SV
Shared Viewership is all about merging into one during a live stream. That means that two or more streamers can team up to create something new (video or audio content), bring their audiences together, and become one big community during their co-streams.
Activating Shared Viewership with another streamer is quite straightforward: first, you should enable Shared Chat and then go to an active session of Stream Together. Shared Viewership will automatically turn on for all channels.
All streamers have to create a shared experience equally interesting for all communities watching and actively engage with them in Shared Chat during their co-stream to get the full benefits of such reach expansion.
Exception: Twitch made an exception only for brand promotions and brand channels because there are moments where a streamer and brand will benefit from streaming the same content across multiple channels while sharing Chat & Viewership.
The Pros and The Concerns
On the surface it sounds like a community-building dream, bringing fans together, fostering partnerships, and creating bigger, more exciting content. But the reality? It's complicated.
Twitch ranks streamers by Viewership. Combine audiences, and suddenly, you're rocketing up the list. Good for visibility, right? Except it can easily be exploited. There are collaborations that are less about content and more about boosting rankings, sometimes in questionable ways, illegal television streams being one that springs to mind. And what happens when everyone uses SV? Will it become paid or only-for-chosen-ones? If the system isn't policed, coordinated viewership stunts could overrun the directory that helps smaller creators get noticed.
But beyond the rankings, let's talk about the impact on the streaming experience for creators and their communities.
Twitch has always stood out because of the bond between streamers and viewers. That is what drives subscriptions and long-term engagement. With combined audiences, chat moves faster, sometimes significantly so. For smaller or mid-sized creators, that one-on-one engagement, the heart of Twitch, becomes harder. Viewers end up tossed into a melting pot of unfamiliar chatters. While that might seem like a way to grow, it can feel very alienating for loyal fans looking for their home vibe.
During these collaborations creators naturally focus more on their streaming partners than their chats, so viewers end up as passive spectators instead of active participants. And this lack of connection has real consequences. Without that personal touch why would someone subscribe? The connection, not just the content, keeps viewers coming back and willing to pay.
The Implications
And here's the kicker. Co-stream participants can grow their audiences simply by exchanging it with other creators. But there are risks related to safety when collaborating with other streamers. Shared Viewership affects more than just the creators. It impacts Twitch itself. Twitch's revenue comes from ads and subscriptions. If people don't feel connected enough to subscribe, they'll either tolerate ads, or worse - turn to alternative platforms.
Shared Viewership might boost some numbers in the short term, but it could hurt the platform in the long run if it erodes the community bonds. Some viewers or even collaborators can behave inappropriately during a joint live stream. The Stream Together feature helps eliminate those risks as when collaborators log into their Twitch account they are tracked and are responsible for their actions. Otherwise, they can always be individually reported. The hosts must condemn behavior violating Twitch Terms of Service and remove anyone breaking the rules.
The Role of Entyx
Entyx offers advertisers a full set of AI tools to track all necessary stats and manage ad integrations independently from one place without requiring streamers. We provide a centralized AI Marketing platform for real-time tracking, managing, and optimizing campaigns. This means that advertisers have access to a database of streamers from Twitch, which updates in real-time and displays the results of collaborations, Shared Viewership, and other long-existing features.
Advertisers can easily manage ad integrations without disrupting the streamers' workflow and manage their ad integrations independently on the Entyx platform. Join for more!
Final Thoughts
Shared Viewership is a major update on Twitch, which changes the approach to co-streams and opens a whole new way to grow audiences and, therefore, attract more sponsors. This new feature will seamlessly integrate and make collaborations accessible to brands and viewers.
As Twitch aims to help streamers grow their audience, it will undoubtedly remain a leader in the streaming industry. In the future, we expect more significant updates than Shared Viewership, which will focus on improving the interactions between streamers, audiences, and brands. Entyx will always support these updates on Twitch with our AI technology, giving a 360-degree overview of each channel, collaboration and sharing insights on sources of potential profits in real-time.
Twitch Update Source: Blog