#ADayOffTwitch

Yesterday, September 1st 2021, thousands of Twitch streamers participated in the #ADayOffTwitch movement. An event with the intended purpose to raise awareness about the recent increase of "hate raids". "Hate raids" are an occurrence where a streamer will send their followers to raid another stream with the intent of filling the comment section with viewers who will leave racist, derogatory, and homophobic messages. The effects are becoming amplified as of late due to the use of bots to increase the capacity and volume of messages through spam.

#ADayOffTwitch emerged from the #TwitchDoBetter movement, which was the initial hashtag to raise awareness about this issue. The escalation from awareness to boycott was done with the intent to pressure Twitch into implementing a fix ASAP, although Twitch has already shared that changes are in the works. Because of our direct integration with Twitch, we're able to compile accurate data surrounding changes in both viewership and channel's streaming across the platform. The following graphs and supporting data showcases any significant, or lack thereof, change in Twitch viewership and channel population for the #ADayOffTwitch boycott for September 1st compared to the previous 7 days.

As we can see, there was a significant impact on the platform, but not how one might have imagined. The number of concurrent channels streaming didn't really drop that much compared to previous days, but the overall viewership took a MASSIVE hit. Here is the overall data from 2 weeks prior to September 1st compared to the actual day of the boycott:

Total channels streaming during the day only dropped around 40,000 channels, about 5%, but the total viewer hours dropped by 10 MILLION, about 16.5%. That's a massive drop from day to day viewer hours. The #ADayOffTwitch movement might not have made a super visible impact on the amount of channels streaming, but it clearly made a very noticeable statistical impact on viewer hours.

When looking at the overall impact of the boycott compared to the previous month, it's the most drastic single day change in viewership by far.

Considering the purpose of the movement, this is certainly the most desirable outcome, considering viewers are the ones who supply the majority of the revenue for the streaming platform. Time will tell if this show of support for marginalized channels impacts the expedience of Twitch's planned implementations to protect streamers against hate raids.

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