Over the past year, gamers have broadcasted more than 92 million hours of Fortnite game footage on Twitch, resulting in more than 1.5 billion hours of Fortnite footage streamed by fans.
These statistics shows that the Fortnite game is not only very popular with viewers, but also with content creators and streamers. This sounds great, but it actually creates a very difficult climate for new and smaller streamers: Fortnite is very popular, and thus the choice of Fortnite channels are over saturated. This makes it nearly impossible to grow a channel in this niche.
That’s why there’s a growing community of streamers on Twitch who don’t even post any gaming related content at all: They broadcast their real lives, introducing you to their hobbies and showing off their skills.
Think about it: A photographer who’s deciding to livestream his Lightroom post production process, is actually putting in the time to develop his skills while teaching people about his hobby and creating a community that will support his work. He’ll be able to answer questions from his followers, or maybe even learn a thing or two himself! Showing off your skills and expertise might even bring opportunities to the table you could have never dreamt of in the form of potential projects!
There are far fewer people streaming on these topics, so chances are that more people will organically find out about this. From there, it’s up to the streamer to make his channel attractive to new viewers so they’ll become fans.
Here are a few niches and streamers who have gone off the beaten path and developed unique channels on the platform. We tried to highlight Belgian streamers, but for some niches there weren’t any Belgians involved… Yet.
Speedrunning
Speedrunning is the esports equivalent of a time trial in a racing game. Gamers blasting through games as fast as possible, with the clock as their only competition. Simple concept, but taken to the extremes. It’s safe to say that, with more than 120.000 subscribers to the reddit speedrun community, there is an international market for this niche. While there are actually some Belgian speedrunners out there, the niche hasn’t completely come to Belgium yet.
This while we actually have @TheRealBerserkr in Belgium, a speedrunner with 2 World Records in Metal Gear MSX2 on his track record. His twitch channel gave him the opportunity to do appearances at speedrunning events like BSG in Alphen aan den Rijn, the Netherlands.
Photography
My personal favorite streamer in the photography niche is Mike Larremore, also known as 5hoe on Twitch. He’s focussed on photography and is very detailed in his editing.
He recently uploaded a youtube video called “Back to Basics – Photography Livestream Editing Tutorial“, which is a 3 hour (shortened) video from one of his live streams.
“Back to Basics – Photography Livestream Editing Tutorial”
Talk Shows
Talk shows have been a television tradition since the 50’s, and still almost every television station has its own show. With more than 1.6 million followers for the talkshow and podcasts niche, Twitch shows us that this isn’t outdated yet!
This is something the guys at 4entertainment also noticed; They attracted two well-known streamers: The Belgian comedian William Boeva and the Dutch Twitch-streamer Mathia Koolhout, and build a Dutch gaming talk show, called RageQuit. They currently host one show per week, and have attract around 1200 followers so far.
Food & Drinks
It’s safe to say that the chefs and foodies already conquered Instagram, with more than 330 million pictures on the #food hashtag alone. This is a trend that we’re seeing on twitch as well; a niche subculture bringing food lovers around the world together.
A huge inspiration for this subculture is @DomesticDan, a content creator who loves to involve his following in his cooking, which he does by creating pancake art or dishes picked from ingredients chosen by his followers.
Developers
One of the biggest niches that matches with the general Twitch audience, is where game developers live stream the development of their game. It’s the perfect place for pre-release marketing, right?
Casey Muratori has a started twitch channel to create a game (“Handmade Hero”) from scratch, with the goal to create a complete and professional-quality game. In his streams, he explains every single line of its source code; streams are accompanied by by videos that explain every single line of its source code.
