YouTube vs Twitch – Which is Better for Gaming Content Creators?

For gaming content creators, your platform is your home. It’s quite hard to move once you’ve settled down, so finding the right one for you is important from the get-go. Two popular options for gaming creators are Twitch and YouTube – each with their own benefits and use cases.

At MinMxD, we help gamers like you to find the right place to put their content, and create the right strategies to get the biggest returns on your time investment. In this article, we’ll discuss the ins and outs of YouTube and Twitch, helping you decide which is right for you.

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YouTube and Twitch are popular mainstays of internet culture, especially when it comes to finding gaming content to watch. Other options like Kick or TikTok are good as well, but don’t quite have the history that these industry mammoths can attest to. Standing the test of time, YouTube and Twitch are likely to be around for many more years – making them great places to start your gaming career!

With that said, most people tend to pick one over the other. This makes it easier to produce content, and helps you get around tricky legal requirements like exclusivity contracts. So, which is best for you?

Audience Reach

The figures stand for themselves, with YouTube receiving 2.7 billion monthly viewers versus Twitch’s 240 million. On paper, this seems like YouTube is far in the lead, but there are a few things to consider.

1. Audience Types. YouTube is home to a whole host of other content types like vlogs, cooking, pets, memes, music, and more. Meanwhile, Twitch is almost exclusively used by gamers and for gamers, making it a much more targeted audience you’re reaching.
2. Getting Found. We’ll go more into discoverability later on, but basically this means it could be harder to get found on YouTube since there’s so many more creators. However, there are more people looking, so this could vary from creator to creator.
3. While YouTube is a big, well-known household brand, Twitch has a partnership with Amazon with Twitch Prime. The crossover between Twitch and Amazon userbases mean you open up the opportunity for even more monetisation options.

Monetisation Opportunities

Perhaps the biggest factor when picking your content creation home isn’t how quickly you can grow, but what the upper limit is for capitalising on your figures. Monetisation is the way content creators make money, as sending out free content alone doesn’t quite pay the bills.

Both YouTube and Twitch have similar monetisation models, with paid channel subscribers, donations, and ad revenue.

Where Twitch excels is through donations, as people tend to contribute far more often during livestreams than otherwise.

However, YouTube has livestreaming capabilities of its own, though they aren’t as popular as Twitch with many livestreamers turning to simulcasting to get the biggest audiences. Instead, what YouTube offers best is sponsorship deals – there’s plenty of businesses looking to get their name out, your videos are one of the best places to do it, and they’re willing to pay big for the convenience.

Other monetisation opportunities include merch, Patreon, and long-standing brand deals, all of which can be found on both platforms.

Content Flexibility

A big differentiator between YouTube and Twitch is the types of content you can produce. While Twitch does offer some video saving through archives and clips, it is nowhere near the level of the high-quality edited content that you can find on YouTube.

As YouTube also offers streaming capabilities, it gives you far more flexibility for your content. Static videos stay on your channel until you take them down (or get a copyright strike) so they will continue to provide you with growth and revenue over time.

What Twitch lacks in flexibility, it makes up for in focus, with Twitch streamers often able to pull in far larger numbers than your average stream on YouTube. The question, then, is how important is streaming to you?

Discoverability

If you want to turn gaming content creation into a career, then you need people to discover your channel. The discoverability of your content is vital to your early days as well as your long-term growth, so you need to pick a platform with a growth strategy in mind.

Twitch has a streamlined categories section that enables viewers to look through and pick out streamers who’re playing a game they’re interested in. This can greatly help with getting discovered during the early stages of your channel, and your position on this page will only rise as you get more viewers.

On the other hand, YouTube is a great place to flex your SEO (search engine optimisation) knowledge and really refine your video titles and descriptions to get the greatest reach. Being picked up by the algorithm is every content creator’s dream, and you can turn it into a reality with the right strategy in mind.

If you want to find out how to get discovered as a gaming content creator, contact our team today.

Engagement

Finally, you will want to focus on engagement – specifically, building and cultivating a community on your chosen platform. Twitch streamers have to constantly engage their audiences while streaming, and unless you go off-platform with social groups and the like this will be the only time you get to engage with your audience.

On the other hand, interactions in comment sections on your YouTube videos will be there until you remove them, so this way you get to engage with your community over a longer period of time. This can be a great way to take your time with community building and carve out a niche audience that’s right for you.

Check out our top five tips for creating engaging content >

There’s quite a lot to take in with these benefits, and no clear and objective answer as to whether YouTube or Twitch is better for gaming content creators. To help you reach a conclusion, consider these questions:

• Do you want to be a livestreamer?
• How often do you want to create content?
• How quickly do you want your channel to grow?
• What monetisation options do you feel most comfortable pursuing?
• What games do you play, and what content do you want to produce?

These are all vital questions to answer before you settle on a platform. If you like livestreaming, want rapid engagement with your community, and access to lucrative donations, then Twitch may be the place for you. On the other hand, if you want to have some separation between yourself and your audience, take your time with videos, and have your content stick around for life, then maybe YouTube is the place to go.

Either way, while the decision is ultimately in your hands, you can make the best choice by working with a partner you can trust.

Now that you know the benefits of both YouTube and Twitch, it’s time to make your choice as to which platform to call your home. There’s always the option of choosing both – streaming on Twitch, making videos on YouTube, or even simultaneously streaming on both platforms. However, what’s most important is making a decision guided by your goals.

At MinMxD, we can apply our extensive industry knowledge to help you pick the right platform for your gaming channel. If you’re interested in finding out more, please get in touch with our team today!

Find out more about becoming a full-time gaming content creator >

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