About Creator Census

How we track live streaming and chat analytics across platforms

Creator Census is a streaming analytics tool focused on going deep, not wide. We track live viewership and — uniquely — full chat activity across Twitch, YouTube Gaming, and Kick, with cross-platform comparisons no other public tool offers.

Our goal isn't to cover every game in existence. It's to be the single best source for understanding how live streaming and chat actually work, across the platforms that matter most.

What We Track

Twitch Every 15 min
Live channels, viewer counts, hours watched, game categories, and channel profiles. Our deepest dataset — we track the top channels across all categories with comprehensive historical data.
Twitch Chat Live
Per-channel chat analytics for the top ~1,000 live Twitch streams: messages per minute, unique chatters, sub badge density, top words, top emotes, and a 24-hour activity heatmap. We connect via IRC and aggregate every 5 minutes.
YouTube Gaming Every 30 min
Top live gaming streams from YouTube's gaming directory. We track the most-watched live streams and build historical viewer data over time. Coverage focuses on the top live channels — not all of YouTube is tracked.
Kick Every 15 min
Live channels across all languages, viewer counts, and game categories. We track the top live streams on Kick with broad international coverage.
Kick Chat Live
Per-channel chat analytics for the top ~1,000 live Kick streams. Same metrics as Twitch chat — and because we collect both simultaneously, we can compare the same creator's engagement across both platforms when they simulcast. This is the only public dataset that does so.
Steam Every 15 min
Concurrent player counts for popular Steam games. We track a curated list of the most-played titles and expand as new games trend.

Things to Know

We don't track everything

No analytics platform captures 100% of all streams or all players. Our data represents a comprehensive sample of the most-watched content on each platform, not a complete census of every channel. Smaller channels may not appear in our data.

Stats are based on sampling

Viewer counts, player counts, and other metrics are snapshots taken at regular intervals. A streamer's actual peak viewers may be slightly higher than what we record if the peak occurred between our collection points. This is standard across all analytics platforms.

YouTube coverage is growing

YouTube's data structure is fundamentally different from Twitch and Kick — there's no single "live gaming directory" API. Our YouTube coverage focuses on the top live gaming streams and expands over time as we discover more channels. If a YouTube creator doesn't appear in our data yet, it means we haven't tracked them — not that they don't exist.

Cross-platform matching is name-based

When we link the same creator across Twitch, Kick, and YouTube, we match by username. This means creators who use different names on different platforms may not be automatically linked. We supplement automatic matching with manual curation.

Historical data

We retain detailed snapshot data for 7 days and daily aggregates indefinitely. Long-term trends (30-day, all-time) use these daily rollups rather than individual snapshots.

Data Sources

All data is collected from official public APIs and publicly available information. We do not scrape private data, bypass authentication, or access any data that isn't intended to be public. Specific API documentation is available from each platform's developer portal.

Contact

For questions, corrections, or partnership inquiries, reach out via social media or email.