Twitch & YouTube stats expose massive gap between male and female viewership

Despite the first quarter of 2021 seeing the rise of Rachel ‘Valkyrae’ Hofsetter among other female creators, statistics show that the disparity between male and female streamers is still massive.

Across Twitch and YouTube, the two major platforms for livestreamed gaming content, there are a number of standout names, of all genders.

While women such as Valkyrae and Imane ‘Pokimane’ Anys have risen to the upper echelons of streaming, they are surrounded by an overwhelming majority of men. In the top 100 most-watched streamers on Twitch, only 2 are not men: Pokimane and Hafu.

This has been proven in a report of Q1, 2021, in which stats show that male streamers are, on average, attracting far more viewership than other genders.

100 Thieves

100 Thieves’ iconic content creator Valkyrae topped the charts for the most viewed female creator.

The report notes that “The male/female streamer gap is still substantial. Valkyrae placed 27th overall in total hours watched across both male and female streamers and Pokimane placed 98th.”

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Considering that both women wracked up 12.2m and 6.8m across YouTube and Twitch respectively, the queens of streams are both doing pretty well, but are still placing very far down the tier list.

Part of this disparity can be explained by Twitch’s demographic. According to one report, in 2020, 65% of Twitch users were male.

Félix ‘xQc’ Lengyel tops the charts with 73.2m, which is more than 6 times Valkyrae’s numbers and the tenth highest streamer, Ibai ‘ibai’ Llanos, has 21.6m. The discrepancies are literally huge.

Stream Hatchet

Rae is hardly doing badly, but compared to other male streamers her viewership is minimal.

It must be noted though, that hours watched is also influenced a lot by hours streamed. To compare xQc with Pokimane, for example, xQc has streamed 1,805 hours in the past 6 months, vs Pokimane’s 584 hours.

In the VTube sphere, however, female avatars reign supreme. This may be due to the high anime-based viewership, but it’s definitely a sphere in which women seem to thrive more than men.

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While the stats could inspire a thousand different debates, it’s still good to see more female content creators breaking out into the fray.

It’ll be interesting to see what quarter two of 2021 has in store.