Viewership Trend Labels

Twitch's sidebar has a new test that shows whether streamers are having a surge in viewership and whether they are keeping those viewers. What's unclear is what triggers these statuses to appear. According to multiple people, they appeared after a raid and disappeared relatively quickly. Others said they noticed that it went from "Keeping" to "Surging" when the number increased by 1. At the moment, it's unclear what the conditions for the label are.

Check out the conversation about this on Twitter, Bluesky, or Threads.

Context:

Twitch continues to work on FOMO features that encourage people to jump into a stream in the sidebar out of curiosity. It started somewhat holistically with things like Hype Train or Golden Kappa, but more recently, to show active stream streaks and warnings about ones that are expiring. It seems they are trying to incentivize channel hopping.

My Thoughts:

One of the benefits of getting a Front Page slot is that you have way more viewers than usual. That inspires people to come check out why. So, this looks to offer a similar curiosity hook - why is their viewership surging? On the surface, I'm not really sure if it's compelling. If I know someone usually has 100 viewers, is 150 viewers a reason for me to go look? And, worse still, pessimistically, if it is effective, it's an ad trap: click the channel, get a pre-roll ad. I don't see the value in this for creators in any way, (nor do they really need another phantom metric to be concerned about).