PopFactor: Live-Streamer Behavior and Popularity

TL;DR

This study analyzes how streamer behaviors on Twitch, such as effort and social media promotion, relate to their popularity and success, revealing that behavioral efforts can predict growth and success over time.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis linking streamer behaviors with popularity metrics, highlighting the predictive value of behavioral data for success prediction.

Findings

Behavioral information improves prediction of streamer growth.

Effortful streamers tend to be more successful.

Social media promotion is effective regardless of account age.

Abstract

Live video-streaming platforms such as Twitch enable top content creators to reap significant profits and influence. To that effect, various behavioral norms are recommended to new entrants and those seeking to increase their popularity and success. Chiefly among them are to simply put in the effort and promote on social media outlets such as Twitter, Instagram, and the like. But does following these behaviors indeed have a relationship with eventual popularity? In this paper, we collect a corpus of Twitch streamer popularity measures --- spanning social and financial measures --- and their behavior data on Twitch and third party platform. We also compile a set of community-defined behavioral norms. We then perform temporal analysis to identify the increased predictive value that a streamer's future behavior contributes to predicting future popularity. At the population level, we find that behavioral information improves the prediction of relative growth that exceeds the median streamer. At the individual level, we find that although it is difficult to quickly become successful in absolute terms, streamers that put in considerable effort are more successful than the rest, and that creating social media accounts to promote oneself is effective irrespective of when the accounts are created. Ultimately, we find that studying the popularity and success of content creators in the long term is a promising and rich research area.