For brands
Reach a Gaming Audience Without Games
By Franziska Händel · Chief Growth Officer
Wanting to reach a gaming audience and therefore booking game categories sounds logical and still misses the people. The most-watched category on Twitch has for years not been one where anything is played: "Just Chatting" — people talking. Add cooking, music, sport, creative work and travel. Plan by game title alone and you exclude a large share of the very people you meant to buy.
The mistake is in the name
"Gaming audience" describes an origin, not an interest. What is usually meant is people roughly between 16 and 35 who barely watch linear television and spend much of their media time on platforms where individuals rather than broadcasters make the schedule. Whether those people are currently watching a game or listening to someone talk is secondary for media planning.
What matters is the quality of attention. In a livestream someone sits for a long stretch with a person they chose themselves, and is addressable while doing it — in chat, in polls, in reactions. That is a different environment from a scrolled feed, and it is the actual reason the audience is reachable here.
What this changes about planning
Three practical consequences:
Categories are a weak selection criterion. A channel switches category several times over an evening. Planning by game title means planning on a variable that changes hourly.
The channel is the more stable unit. People watching a channel come for the person. The make-up of that audience is considerably more stable over weeks than whatever category is running right now.
Reach accumulates. The big channels are expensive and booked out. The middle tier — channels with a loyal but modest audience — is unremarkable individually and relevant in aggregate. Why that adds up arithmetically is in our CPM explainer.
Non-gaming does not mean indiscriminate
The mistake in the other direction would be turning "not only games" into "anything goes". A cooking stream and a sports stream have little in common beyond the absence of gameplay. Selection still has to happen — just along channel, audience and topic rather than along a game title.
For brands outside gaming and consumer electronics, that is the real opening. A drink, an insurance policy, a delivery service, a training course: these rarely sit well beside a shooter, but they sit well beside a channel where someone talks, cooks or builds things. Those environments were hard to access through conventional gaming buys.
Where to start
The fastest way forward is to invert the question. Not "which games suit us", but "what kind of channel would our customers voluntarily watch for an hour". The selection follows almost by itself from that answer, and it survives the next game trend.
Which channels and environments are currently available, and how a campaign can be cut to fit them, is shown on the advertiser page. If you first want to know which platform is even in the running, our platform comparison is the better starting point.