For years, Twitch has been trying to shed its reputation as a platform for only gamers. Closing that perception gap is now a key priority for Twitch’s new CMO Christine Cassis.
“It’s time that we really buck this notion that [Twitch] isn’t for someone that isn’t identifying with that core gaming group,” Cassis said on Thursday’s episode of Scalable. She joined Twitch in August after leadership roles at Pinterest, Reddit, Google and Shopify.
In recent years, the livestreaming platform has been expanding into everything from beauty to sports. While there’s still a lot of work to do to grow these new audiences, there are signs that these efforts are starting to pay off.
Last year, livestreams tagged with “GRWM”—short for get ready with me—generated 1.1 million hours watched, up 196% over 2024. The number of streamers using that tag also rose 85%, according to Twitch.
Other categories, including politics and podcasting, have been gaining steam lately, too. That coincides with a broader resurgence in livestreaming as creators, celebrities and even government officials try to find new ways to cut through the noise and connect with audiences.
In May, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani launched a chat show on Twitch called “Talk with the People,” where he answers questions live from New Yorkers. Last month, Spotify began streaming some of its video podcasts from The Ringer on Twitch, including sports gambling show “Wise Guys.”
“It's probably similar to how people are gravitating towards group chats,” Cassis said, explaining why users are taking to Twitch. “[People] don’t want to be broadcast to all of the time. They want to be in dialogue.”
Brands are also getting into the mix. Mattel is launching a live competition series based on its card game Uno on Twitch, culminating with an in-person and livestreamed event in November where the winner will take home $50,000.
Even so, most of these categories are still tiny when compared to gaming. Twitch’s talk shows and podcasts category, for example, accounts for less than 1% of all live viewers, according to data from analytics site Streams Charts.
Meanwhile, Twitch viewers watched more than 8.6 billion hours of gaming content between January to September, according to a new report from the company. And almost all of the top Twitch categories streamed in the past seven days were video games, per the Streams Charts data.
One exception was “Just Chatting,” Twitch’s most popular content category, where creators engage directly with their audiences. Those streams can be related to gaming, but they also include other IRL experiences from cooking to walking tours.
Looking ahead, one of the biggest opportunities for Twitch seems to be in sports. On Friday, Twitch is expanding Creator Cast—which brings live games on Prime Video to Twitch with creator hosts—to women’s soccer. The new series will include select National Women’s Soccer League games.
“Being able to participate in chat really adds a lot of value vs. just this passive noise,” Cassis said of sporting events.
To date, Creator Cast broadcasts have averaged more than 788,000 total views and 3.3 million total minutes watched per broadcast, according to the company. What’s more, athlete and celebrity streams related to sports are up nearly 20% year over year, the company said.
A screen grab from a Creator Cast livestream. Photo: Courtesy of Twitch
Twitch’s efforts to diversify—while maintaining its core gaming fans—also come as the Amazon-owned company is looking to diversify its revenue. Roughly two-thirds of Twitch’s revenue comes from subscriptions, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy said at the Scalable Summit in May. Many advertisers have historically been wary of livestreaming as it can be unpredictable.
Sports could help change that, too: Hyundai will be the presenting sponsor of the NWSL Creator Cast series, while State Farm and Intuit Credit Karma have sponsored the WNBA’s version.
The growing dissatisfaction toward algorithmically-driven social platforms, which are increasingly serving up AI content, could also make Twitch more attractive to users and advertisers. Cassis seems to agree, saying she sees Twitch as an “antidote” to other platforms that are overrun with AI slop.
At the same time, she says AI-generated content is inescapable. “That just is the internet in the year of 2026,” she said.
Murky Measurement
The creator economy is full of opaque or ambiguous metrics. Now we can add one more to the list.
Last week, YouTube announced “Views (co-viewed),” a new metric estimating how many people watched content together on a TV screen, rather than counting each TV playback as a single view. How? YouTube says it uses a statistical model that predicts how many people sat around a TV set at a given time. Read: We don’t actually know.
The metric is only available in YouTube Analytics, meaning that public view metrics on a creator’s channel won’t change. Neither will AdSense payouts. Instead, YouTube says that creators can use this new metric to negotiate better rates for brand deals. We have a hard time believing that “co-views” won’t raise advertiser eyebrows.
The announcement also followed changes to how YouTube counts views overall. In late August, the company started counting long-form video views immediately. That puts YouTube more in line with short-form video platforms—and it will also beef up YouTube’s own viewership numbers.
Zooming out, these moves underscore the growing need for independent, standardized measurement in the creator economy.
These shifts in view counts also come as YouTube is facing increasing pressure from Netflix and other streamers for both creators and viewers. We go deeper into YouTube’s other challengers, including Disney, Spotify, Twitch and Tubi, in this week’s podcast. The episode also includes our full interview with Twitch’s CMO Cassis. Tune in on YouTube, Spotify, Apple—or wherever you get your podcasts!
The Round Up
Instagram launched a new feature that lets users add posts they’re tagged in to their main profile grid. Previously, those posts showed up in a different tab on their profile.
Cherub, a network connecting founders, investors and creators to early-stage investing and advisory opportunities, raised $4.5 million in funding. Investors include VC fund Baukunst, Slauson & Co. and Ghost Angels.
Substack added a podcast tab to its iOS and Android apps where users can discover shows and listen to current subscriptions. Other newsletter platforms such as Beehiiv have also been adding podcasting features as newsletters expand beyond just written work. (Check out our recent episode that dove deep into the state of the newsletter industry here.)
The NFL’s creator program is returning and will be its “most expansive” to date. On Thursday, for example, more than 100 creators and athletes will be at the NFL’s first-ever regular season game in Australia to watch the San Francisco 49ers face the Los Angeles Rams. Catch up on how the league’s creator strategy evolved last season here.
Community is shaping up to be one of the biggest buzzwords of the year. The latest example: Raptive, a creator and publisher monetization platform, on Wednesday launched a new community platform for creators to connect with their fans and earn money without paywalling content. Creators will receive 50% of ad revenue from programmatic ads that run on the platform. Typically, creators have earned money from communities through paid subscriptions or exclusive content.
By the Numbers: 56%
That’s the percentage of shoppers who prefer AI-generated shopping recommendations that incorporate creator or influencer perspectives, according to new data from the IAB.
Another 65% of shoppers said they are more confident in AI recommendations when they are informed by credible creator reviews. (All respondents had used AI for shopping-related research in the past three months.)
Taken together, these results suggest that AI and creators are more complementary than competitive. That’s strong evidence for brands that their burgeoning AI shopping strategies shouldn’t be taking away from their creator efforts.
More broadly, these figures are also proof that creators can help build more trust in AI. On the surface, that’s a good signal for all the AI companies that have been throwing money at creators to help improve the public’s perception of the technology.
But the data looked at one specific AI use case. It’s a stretch to assume that how people feel about creators and AI in shopping will automatically extend to larger, societal questions and concerns about the technology.
Plus, the data raises all sorts of questions about attribution and compensation for creators, which could make people less trusting of these companies if they feel like they are ripping off creator reviews.
Snapchat Snapshot
• Watch out Partiful? Snapchat launched a new event-planning feature to help users organize events, send invites and collect responses within the app.
• Leadership shakeup: Ronan Harris was promoted to Snap’s chief commercial officer, leading global advertising sales and go-to-market organization. Previously, he led the company’s business across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Ajit Mohan, who was most recently chief business officer, is leaving the company after nearly four years.
• In a note to staff this week, CEO and co-founder Evan Spiegel marked the company’s 15 year anniversary.
“I’ve never been more excited about our business and I believe it is so much stronger than some people may think. That might be a surprise at our current share price, so let me tell you why I feel that way,” he wrote, pointing to factors that make Snap unique including its focus on friends over public follower counts.
Snap’s stock is currently trading at about $5 per share, down sharply from its 2021 peak of roughly $83 per share.
Regulatory Woes
Australia plans to let people opt out of algorithms. Earlier this week, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced plans to require social media giants to allow users to pick between a chronological feed of accounts they follow or an algorithmically-driven feed.
On Thursday, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri briefed reporters about the launch of the company’s “Algo Confessions” series in Australia, a promotional campaign featuring celebrities and influencers who explain how Instagram decides what content appears in a user’s feed and highlighting the ways users can control their own settings.
While Mosseri didn’t directly address Albanese’s plans, he said engagement and user satisfaction goes down with reverse chronological feeds, according to The Guardian. “It turns out your friends post a lot less than creators, who post a lot less than brands and companies,” Mosseri said, saying people would be “overwhelmed” with content from brands in an algorithm-free feed.
While we agree that people should have more choice in what they see, we also think people might get bored of going back to friends or followers-only content. We went deeper on this in a recent podcast episode, embedded below.
Creator Moves
Crooked Media’s nonprofit arm, Crooked Ideas, is launching a new initiative aimed at attracting younger voters to the Democratic party, Semafor reported. The effort will support existing and emerging political creators with different video formats, such as short-form comedy. Crooked Media’s most high-profile podcast is “Pod Save America.”
Amanda Hirsch, the host of the “Not Skinny But Not Fat” podcast, apologized after a Polymarket sponsored post where she discussed how users were betting on the results of the Lindsay Clancy murder case. (Clancy, a Massachusetts mother, is accused of killing her three children. Her case ended in a mistrial due to a hung jury.) Hirsch’s show is part of the Dear Media podcast network, which launched a podcast with Polymarket in June.
After fan backlash, Hirsch deleted the post. Her apology in part said: “I should have known better, and I feel sick that I didn’t see that in the moment.”
🍼 Brand Buzz
Does the creator economy have baby fever?
As Alex Cooper continues to clear people’s baby registries, now in partnership with Babylist and Pampers, she’s setting off a trend.
Amazon is partnering with Dr. Becky Kennedy, a creator and the founder of parenting app Good Inside. Dr. Becky, who has 3.5 million Instagram followers, will take over Amazon’s baby registry home page, which will also include a gift card to the Good Inside app as a registry option. Amazon, along with Babylist and Target, are the most popular baby registry platforms in the US.
Your move, Target.
Talent Tracker
Alex Heath is becoming an investor at Sound Ventures. The independent journalist will continue to operate his podcast and tech newsletter Sources. The early-stage VC firm was co-founded by Ashton Kutcher and music manager Guy Oseary, though Kutcher stepped away in July to start a separate fund.
Balancing both roles will inevitably change the nature of his reporting. “I am hanging up my capital J journalist hat,” Heath told the Newcomer newsletter. At the same time, he said “this world is pretty blurry” and “there’s room for a lot of great conversations and insights and getting founders to open up.” Sound Ventures has backed AI companies including OpenAI, Anthropic and Hugging Face, which was just acquired by Nvidia.
Liv Sandberg will join podcast monetization platform Acast as executive vice president of Europe in early 2027. Previously, she was TikTok’s regional general manager of global business solutions for Central Europe and the Nordics.
Sadie Thoma is leaving Google after nearly 15 years. Most recently, she was director of ads marketing for Google and YouTube. She didn’t yet announce next steps.
