Audiences are craving connection – could livestreaming be the answer?

This year has shown a clear audience appetite for live, shared viewing experiences. The finale of the UK’s The Traitors attracted a live audience of 9.4 million viewers in January. An international audience flooded to watch sporting events like the Super Bowl and World Cup, with both events generating record numbers in ad revenues. Justin Bieber’s Coachella set was livestreamed on YouTube, and this performance led to his music being streamed 24.6 million times the following day (as per Rolling Stone). After years of social media becoming less social and more hyper-personalised, audiences are craving real-time unifying viewing moments they can experience together. 

Live and well

These mainstream “monoculture” moments are large-scale, but they speak to an appetite for shared viewing moments – and this appetite could be met on a smaller scale by a user’s daily digital habits. Livestreaming offers an opportunity for a shared, real-time experience on a regular basis, with the ability to interact and connect with creators. The livestreaming market’s early growth was driven largely by gaming; gamers keenly adopted the medium for its ability to deliver an engaging and immediate viewing experience. Gaming frequently sets the path for the rest of the cultural world to follow – whether that’s internet slang, IP, or interactive tech – and livestreaming has proved no exception as it broadens into the mainstream. Today, 27% of internet users watch live content on a weekly basis (as per Go Globe). Twitch, the world’s largest dedicated livestream platform, is driving expansion beyond gaming to lifestyle, talk shows, music content, and more. Many of the biggest creators today, such as Kai Cenat and IShowSpeed, blend video game streams with comedy, reaction videos, and travel content. 

The livestreaming opportunity 

The modern, multi-platform creator tends to use short-form videos to drive discovery on platforms like TikTok or Instagram before drawing the audience towards long-form viewing elsewhere. Livestreaming represents an opportunity to lead viewers even further down the engagement funnel. MrBeast, the world’s most followed YouTuber, co-hosted a star-studded YouTube Live competition with IShowSpeed, garnering an audience of upwards of 1 million concurrent viewers (as per Tubefilter). This event demonstrates that once a creator has developed a fandom, that fandom will follow them elsewhere for greater access and more authentic, unfiltered content. And if the most successful content creator in the world sees an opportunity in livestreaming, it likely won’t be long before more creators follow. Livestreams offer an opportunity for creators to deepen fandom and community and convert attention into revenue – whether that’s through in-app gifts, sponsorships, or subscriptions. 

From clips to community

Livestreaming platforms currently lack the discovery engines to support new creators. Despite years of uploading, IShowSpeed’s livestreams only blew up after clips of his reactions went viral on TikTok. The most successful livestreamers are harnessing various platforms to their advantage, clipping the most notable moments from streams and distributing them across short-form platforms to aid discovery. Some creators exploit this formula by actively building rage bait and sensationalism into their livestreams to elicit strong reactions on social media. If this continues, livestreaming platforms risk driving audiences away rather than building communities. 

Livestreaming’s strength is shared, real-time community. There is clear demand for collective community moments and an opportunity for livestreaming to meet it, but platforms need discovery tools that let creators grow within their ecosystem, rather than relying on short-form viral videos and sensationalism.