There's literally no reason not to stream on both now, but Twitch's success is a mixed bag and if I were to pick one to favor over the other it would be YouTube. Twitch at low numbers is the wagiecuck of streaming: you go live, you do your hours, you get sustainable views, then you clock off and the world forgets about you, repeat. The endgame isn't appealing either if you ask me, but we'll get to that later. Twitch doesn't cultivate an online presence like YouTube does at smaller numbers, I find people with a dedicated YouTube following are discussed way more than twitch peers at similar numbers, sometimes even versus larger twitch streamers.
In short, there's a much higher relevance-to-performance ratio.
Here's an example where numbers mean nothing outside the ecosystem:
View attachment 98939
Pumpkin Potion is a vtuber whose got great numbers, a constant flow of guests, a unique appeal in vtubing and a well-performing YouTube video channel, no dramas from what I can find, shows up at conventions and has been active for 4 years with a prior history in online entertainment going back ten years. 100k followers, 6000+ members in her discord, 1500 twitch subs, averaging 200k views on her shorts, great numbers.
I've seen her discussed ONCE in my five years of being terminally online with this shit.
A cursory search on here doesn't do her any favors; 2 page results on here, half of them are just Hololive summaries with matching keywords, and a few others just being collab associations. You can't brush it off as this forum as just being YouTube focused either, as I see a good amount of twitch channel drops on here, one could reasonably assume she would have gotten some general mentions with those numbers, right? Maybe elsewhere? Not really, we'll get to that in a bit, but let's compare her to someone
much smaller.
View attachment 98937
Yuno Nightingale, basically an ant by comparison, has more than double the search results on TVA and she's been talked about enough online that I can remember her and her niche without seeing a single one of her streams. I'm not delusional enough to say that makes her more famous but it's a testament to the impact the platform has when a low 2view can get more consistent presence. Amiya Aranha occupies the same niche and is widely considered an indie darling, and the gap between Nightingale and Amiya is vastly smaller than the one with Pumpkin which makes relevancy a more reasonable objective (Amiya is omni-talented though, so Onolumi may be a fairer comparison, she still has presence too).
View attachment 98938
To help counter my viewing bias I looked for Pumpkin Potion to see how often she's brought up:
- Reddit she has 26 results across 4 years in r/virtualyoutubers, Amiya has around 99 in the same timespan, Yuno has 2 results in 1 year. Out of interest, I searched Tomoe Umari too as she approaching 100k like PP (go sub btw) and she has over 30 results.
- Warosu, she's only ever had 5 OPs, and less than a hundred posts directly referencing her
- I compared pumpkinpotion and amiyaaranha on twitter, sorted by latest; after a few scrolls on pumpkin it knocks me back into early May. With Ami I can scroll a fair bit and still see post engagements in the last 24 hours
So including TVA, that's 4 counts of social media where Pumpkin has barely any presence. Maybe all twitch communities congregate to Discord? Would explain the grooming allegations the scene gets.
My scientific conclusion: every twitch viewer is only worth 1/10th a YouTube viewer.
The reality is that most smaller vtubers on both platforms face a long grind and should take every advantage they can get if they're serious about vtubing. It ultimately boils down to algo luck or a viral moment to skyrocket, the key difference is that grinding on YouTube builds up a portfolio and if they have a boom they will be associated to the niche they care about, whilst climbing up the ladder on twitch will slowly force them to orbit a hegemony of meangirl cliques and VRchat fugitives since that's largely what the upper echelon of twitchtuber peers consist of.
Another issue if you're chasing Twitch fame: your audience is likely to be tuned into the platform's zeitgeist and through that the bigger content creator's shit is going to roll downhill onto your lap and before you know it you're reacting to Assmangold's reactions, adapting your language to the current netslop lingo, commenting on vtuber drama that doesn't involve you, and eventually your channel will become just as homogenously online as everyone else that hits a certain peak. This is what I meant earlier by the twitch endgame being a dogshit prospect. Even Dooby brushed against the Sinder drama. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of
when.
If living off streaming is your goal then like I said earlier, Twitch is the wagiecuck of vtubing, you'll get better results, but if your goal is to be known for something and actually matter, put effort into Youtube.
Next time you see someone flaunting about a vtuber's discoverability and numbers on Twitch, ask yourself: do you also find yourself thinking "Literally Who?"
