By the time you finish reading this sentence, an estimated 2.9 million gamers will log onto Twitch to watch their favorite gaming personalities.
As fun as it is to watch others play, creating your own streams can be a fun and even lucrative hobby. But before you amass a huge audience, you’ll have to choose where you’ll host your streams.
Keep reading to find out which live streaming platform is best for your upcoming streams!
Twitch
Twitch’s popularity is hard to overstate, with an estimated 5.44 billion hours watched per quarter on the platform.
The platform now takes up the lion’s share of all streaming thanks to its ease of use and brand recognition. As such, you’ll have access to a much wider audience just by using Twitch.
Another reason for Twitch’s popularity is its partnership with parent company, Amazon. Amazon Prime subscribers can link their Twitch and Amazon accounts for a free Twitch Prime membership, which grants access to ‘free’ games each month, as well as a free monthly channel subscription.
By reminding viewers with Twitch Prime that they can subscribe to your channel for free, you’ll likely earn some extra subscribers each stream, thus growing your audience.
Likewise, canceling Twitch Prime can be quite the chore, so you’re likely to keep most of those subs over time.
YouTube
It’s a little baffling that YouTube’s gaming platform isn’t more popular than it is. Aside from being hosted on one of the most popular websites in the world, YouTube offers benefits that other live streaming platforms can’t compete with, such as SEO title optimization, which can help immensely with discoverability.
Plus, if you have a YouTube account, all you have to do is set up your game, click ‘stream now’ and entertain your audience.
Like Twitch, YouTube is one of the top live streaming platforms when it comes to accessibility, too. YouTube is available on just about every device you can think of, including smart TVs and mobile devices.
Facebook Gaming
At the moment, Facebook Gaming is live streaming’s darkhorse. While it’s not quite as popular as its brethren, it’s quickly gaining steam thanks to celebrity partners like Ronda Rousey and streamers like DisguisedToast, who jumped ship from other platforms.
Like Twitch and YouTube, Facebook Gaming is pretty easy to use, though you will have to take the extra step of setting up a Gaming Video Creator page.
That means that you won’t be able to stream directly through your main Facebook account (though you can convert your page to a Gaming Video Creator page). So if you already have a large follower base, you’ll have to start from scratch and cross-promote, which can cause some extra headaches.
Find the Right Live Streaming Platform
Ultimately, the best live streaming platform is still Twitch thanks to its brand recognition alone. So if you haven’t done so already, consider setting up your Twitch account today and running a test stream. It’s surprisingly easy to do and you’ll have an absolute blast!
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