Streamers can now share viewers on Twitch, here’s how

Twitch is launching a new shared viewership system for its creators that they can use to share viewers while using shared chat sessions.

Dan Clancy and Twitch have been receiving massive backlash over the past few months for various reasons. Vtubers claim they are being discriminated against, and viewers are divided ver the extremist content available on the platform. Furthermore, the political and sensitive content is reportedly causing businesses to stop advertising on Twitch. This caused the platform to launch a new political and sensitive issue label that streamers need to add to their streams. Now, Twitch is adding another new feature that might help streamers reach a larger audience.

On December 5, 2024, Zach Bussey announced on X that Twitch is getting a new shared viewers system that will greatly impact directory discovery.

How Twitch shared viewership works

Shared viewership on Twitch will be automatically enabled with shared chat sessions and will display the combined view count of collaborations.

Streams with multiple collaborators will show a shared count of concurrent viewers. This is a new metric that Twitch will use to display the shared viewer count across all the collaborating channels. The new metric will be showcased on all Twitch discovery surfaces. This will increase the reach and discovery of the content significantly.

The content will be sorted based on popularity. Furthermore, the audience will see what the stream is about before joining. The shared viewer number will be visible to both the audience and streamers when they open a channel. However, this number won’t be used to reach partner or other status levels on Twitch. The path to partner and affiliate will still rely on individual popularity.

Streamers and channels will get a massive boost in discovery because of the higher shared viewers number. Despite that, they likely won’t see a significant increase in ad payout. Furthermore, there are some requirements set by Twitch that streamers need to meet to qualify for shared viewers. The two collaborators must be streaming live simultaneously to ensure they are creating new content together.

Shared viewership will be automatically activated when streamers are in an active streaming session with other streamers and have shared chat enabled. This will make it more convenient for streamers as they won’t have to remember to enable an option during each stream.