On September 1, Twitch streamers were invited to participate in #ADayOffTwitch, a day of online protest against hate raids suffered by a number of content creators. A few days later, the first figures, taken from analyst data, fell.
Before that, a little history of the situation. On August 11, Twitch announced that it was taking the issues related to hate raids and, more broadly, bad behavior on its platform very seriously.
A few weeks later, and facing an intensification of these raids, several streamers, RekitRaven, ShineyPen and Lucia Everblack, appealed to the “strike”, quite simply proposing to do not stream during the day of September 1st.
Worldwide, and according to data from Gamesight relayed by The Verge, 14,000 more channels were offline compared to data compiled over the previous eight days.
For its part, GameSpot made a little comparison: on August 25, 4,083,518 hours of live were watched and 189,472 channels were live.
On September 1, the hours seen were in the order of 3,456,576 hours and 171,682 channels were active.
However, these numbers must be weighted, even though the impact of this #ADayOffTwitch day has been felt. On one hand, Gamespot’s scores (not GameSight’s) were taken at noon Pacific Time and therefore do not take into account the entire day.
On the other hand, part of the decrease can be attributed to DrLupo and TimTheTatmam, two prominent streamers who signed with YouTube and left the platform on September 1.
However, the data from CreatorHype indicate that even taking this information into account, Twitch traffic dropped by 5-15% September 1.
During the protest, Twitch publicly expressed support for those targeted and streamers raising awareness. Finally, it seems that RekItRaven, the originator of the initiative, spoke to Twitch, learning on this occasion that specific tools were in active development.