The followers on your Twitch channel indeed matter, but it’s doesn’t mean you need to be obsessed with how many followers you have on your channel
Do Followers mean anything on Twitch?
To most streamers, the follower is the viewer that gets notified every time you start streaming on Twitch. But in the real world, most of your followers won’t watch your stream. So follower count is just a number that won’t mean anything on your channel
Some Twitch streamers want to get more followers because they believe if they have more followers, their channel will grow quickly
Sadly I’m afraid that’s not right. The only number that means anything on Twitch is the number of the average concurrent viewers on your stream, not your follower
What is worse is some streamers buy fake followers by using bots or Follow4Follow scheme, which will be evident if they see your zero viewer count on your channel
But sometimes, your channel’s followers can make a difference on your channel
I have a theory on the type of followers you have on your Twitch Channel. The first is the active follower, and the second is the passive follower. What makes them different from each other?
Active Follower vs. Passive Follower
Active Follower
An active follower on your Twitch channel is a follower that will actually watch your stream. So they are the ones that really following your channel
Some follower is more active than the other. They will participate in the chat room, giving a subscription to other viewers, giving donations and bits every time you start a stream. These are the followers that many streamers dreamed of
Passive Follower
The passive follower is the category of what most of your followers will be. Even though they follow your channel, they won’t watch your stream
Passive followers are the ones that think your channel is worth following because they are interested in watching your channel. But because the other streamers, maybe they are xQc, Shroud, Ludwig, or Ninja are better; they won’t prioritize watching your channel
Or maybe they are the people who accidentally follow your channel. Or what’s even worse, following bots.
Do twitch followers count really doesn’t matter?
The only time it matters is to fulfill the Path to Affiliate Goals and Partnership requirement. But follower number is the easiest requirement to be achieved, so the followers count on your channel doesn’t matter that much
Follow is the easiest thing you can get as a streamer, as what The Verge said. Viewers only need to press one button to follow your channel. Following itself is not necessarily a selfless act. Because there is no cost for pressing the following button except your time and small energy for moving your finger muscle
Don’t believe that your follower’s number is not important?
Many streamers got raided by top streamers on Twitch. After getting raided, it’s common to get a surge of followers from hundred to thousand followers. Yet how many of the followers will keep watching their channel?
Just because popular streamers told their viewers to follow a channel doesn’t mean they will come back in the future. Most of them will forget that they have followed your channel
Not only that, passive followers will always inflate your channel’s follower count. We can’t believe what the number of follower counts shows on your channel.
You need to grind hard to get an active follower on your channel. I have already created a strategy on how to get followers on your Twitch channel
What is more Important on Twitch? Followers or Viewer?
For Twitch streamers, viewers are more important than followers. Because as long you keep streaming, your followers will naturally increase. But regular viewers are hard to get. Even if you keep streaming, your average concurrent viewers won’t increase. This is why viewers are harder to get and more important to your Twitch channel
As a Twitch streamer, always aim to get more viewers instead of a follower. The follower count is the only number that you should forget on your channel.
How many Twitch followers will watch my channel?
According to my observation, only 1-3% of your followers will watch your channel. The number can get positively skewed (or abnormally high) if you only have a few followers. For big streamers with more than a million followers, the percentage of followers who watch their channel can be higher and lower. Usually, Top 100 streamers have more loyal followers than other Partnered streamers.
If a channel has 1000 followers, the concurrent viewers number will usually be around ten viewers. For the total viewers’ number, the duration of the stream is the most crucial factor.
Why is this number so low? Because only a tiny part of your followers are the regulars viewers that keep watching your channel. Most of them only periodically check your stream. If your stream interests them, they will keep watching. If not, then they stop watching your stream
Let’s use xQc as our example.
- xQc has 6 million followers on his channel
- On his last three streams, the average concurrent viewers are 60,000 viewers.
- The average total views are 3 million viewers
In a hypothetical scenario that all his viewers are his follower (which is not because his stream always gets recommended on Twitch), he always gets 1% of his follower count as his viewer.
Which proof our theory of:
1%-3% Follower Count = Number of concurrent viewers
Should I Ignore Follower Growth on my channel?
Don’t completely ignore your follower growth on your channel. You can use the data to check why in some of your streams, the follower growth is higher than in other streams. It depends on what strategy you use to get the most out of Twitch
But if you are too fixating on observing the number, you will get stressed when you can’t achieve your goal. In the end, make sure you enjoy when you stream on Twitch. No need to pay attention to the growth of your number of followers every day unless your average viewers count on your channel suddenly increased
How many followers are good for your Twitch Channel?
There is no exact number of followers that you need to have on your channel. Every streamer has their own growth and potential. You should never compare the number of followers on your channel to other streamer’s follower count
Because each streamer is different and can’t be directly compared. Each Twitch streamers have different techniques, different geographic, different language skills, different streaming setup, motivation, free time, and many more
What is most important each streamer have different lucks. So we can’t compare the success of one streamer to the other
But there is a theory that popular on Reddit. 1,000 True Fan Theory believes that you need to have at least 1,000 True Fan to become successful at any artistic endeavor. So, according to this theory, you need to have at least 1000 followers first before you can gain momentum on Twitch
Obviously, we can’t fully believe this theory, because as the author also said, it’s hard to found proof for this theory. Many artistic endeavors found sudden success after going viral without having any fans before
Don’t forget that the number of your follower is not the secret to success on Twitch.
It’s better to focus on what actually matters on Twitch
Viewers and subscribers are the one matters more for your channel, and you won’t get if you focus too much on your channel’s follower count
Should I Follow My Follower’s Channel?
No, you shouldn’t follow your follower’s channel. Following your follower’s channel is Follow4Follow scheme
Even though most Follow4Follow scheme is actually between Twitch streamers, not the viewers, there is no benefit of following your follower’s channel.
Most of your followers won’t stream on Twitch anyway, so it will be useless to follow them. In fact, if you follow their channel, this will be unfair to the other followers that you haven’t followed
So the best decision to make as a streamer is to don’t follow your follower’s Twitch channel
How much money do Twitch Streamers earn from their follower?
Keep in mind that follower alone won’t earn you anything on Twitch. The question you should ask is how many subscribers you will get from the number of followers
After investigating subscription data from Twitch Tracker, I found that there is no correct answer to this question
Why?
Because Followers doesn’t equal to Subscriber
Is it true that the more Twitch follower equal to more Subscribers?
In fact, it’s the opposite. Many Twitch channels with followers count have fewer subscribers than a channel with fewer followers
Many streamers with more than one million followers have lost their hype and potential to get new viewers. Their viewer growth is stagnant, or worse, keep decreasing every stream
Most of their remaining viewer are loyal viewers that constitute less than 0.05% of the follower count. We can see the proof on the table below (Followers data are from Twitch Metric and Subscriptions Data are from Twitch Tracker)
| Streamer Name | Follower Count Rank | Number of Followers | Number of Subscribers |
| Ninja | 1 | 16 million | 2,500 |
| Tfue | 2 | 10 million | 7600 |
| Rubius | 3 | 9.5 million | 17,000 |
| Shroud | 4 | 9.4 million | 9000 |
| xQcOW | 12 | 6 million | 66,000 |
| Ranboolive | 42 | 3.3 million | 60,000 |
| Hasanabi | 186 | 1.4 million | 45,000 |
Ninja, the former Fornite star, have only 2,500 subscribers despite having 16 million viewers. It’s even less than a third of Tfue and Rubius subscribers. What’s more ironic, Hasanabi, with only 1.4 million followers, can’t get the top 100 followed channel despite having 45,000 subscribers
So, in a nutshell, followers don’t equal to subscribers. More followers don’t equal to more money for a Twitch streamer