Should you stream on YouTube or Twitch? 3% vs 41%

If you want people to find you while you are live, go to Twitch.

We sample every live Grand Theft Auto stream on Kick, Twitch and YouTube once a minute. Over the thirty days to 3 October 2026, 04:00 UTC, the hundred most-watched GTA creators in the world accumulated 50,554,218 hours watched between them. YouTube’s share of that was 3.1%, spread across fourteen creators. Twitch took 41.4% across thirty-five, and Kick 55.5% across fifty-one.

That is the whole answer, and the rest of this post is why the number is worse than it looks.

Platform	Hours watched, 30d	Share	Creators in top 100
Kick	28,069,947	55.5%	51
Twitch	20,938,493	41.4%	35
YouTube	1,545,778	3.1%	14

Top 100 GTA creators by average concurrent viewers, 30 days to 2026-10-03T04:00:52Z. Source: boards/top-creators-30d.json.

Why the guides say the opposite

Checked on 3 October 2026, page one for this query is nine results and every one of them is a guide. They converge on the same story: YouTube is algorithm-first, Twitch is community-first, YouTube surfaces you to strangers while Twitch makes you go and find them. It is a reasonable argument, and parts of it are simply true — the monetisation thresholds and revenue splits those pages compare are published facts.

The discovery claim is not. Not one of those nine pages puts a number on how many people are actually watching anything on either platform’s live categories, which is the only thing that decides whether a stranger can find you.

We can measure one category. For GTA, the claim does not survive contact.

A small audience and a wildly unstable one

Three per cent would be fine if it were a small, steady version of Twitch. It is not. Here is each platform’s live GTA audience over the twenty-four hours to 3 October 04:00 UTC, sampled every five minutes:

Platform	Lowest	Highest	High ÷ low
Kick	40,286	213,953	5.3×
Twitch	16,413	250,295	15.2×
YouTube	500	54,321	108.6×

289 samples per platform, 2026-10-02T04:00Z to 2026-10-03T04:00Z. Both the Kick and Twitch minima are smooth, sustained troughs at 09:15–09:55 UTC, not single-sample dips.

Kick’s audience varies by a factor of five across a day, which is just day and night. Twitch’s varies by fifteen, because its trough is genuinely deep. YouTube’s varies by a hundred and nine.

A hundred and nine is not a daily cycle. It is a category thin enough that individual broadcasts move the whole platform.

One channel is half of it

At our 04:01:42Z census on 3 October there were 81 live GTA channels on YouTube holding 16,790 viewers between them. A single Hindi-language freeroam channel, Hear Is Live, held 9,482 of those — 56.5% of all GTA viewing on YouTube, by itself. The top three held 73.3%.

Ten minutes later we sampled again. That channel had dropped to 3,369 viewers and YouTube’s platform total had fallen 42%, from 16,790 to 9,732, while Kick moved 4.6% and Twitch 2.8%.

Census (UTC)	YouTube total	Biggest channel	Its share
04:01:42	16,790	9,482	56.5%
04:11:42	9,732	3,369	34.6%
04:12:40	9,726	3,369	34.6%

For comparison, at the same three censuses the largest Kick channel held 9.9–10.3% of Kick’s GTA audience and the largest Twitch channel 25.1–26.1% of Twitch’s. This is not a quirk of one morning. Our 04:00 UTC census has run every morning, and on the last three it recorded YouTube holding 51,336 GTA viewers on 1 October, 1,394 on 2 October and 16,790 today — a factor of thirty-seven inside two days, at the same minute of the day, while Kick and Twitch moved by tens of per cent.

If you are choosing a platform, that volatility is the finding. Arriving in a category whose entire audience is one or two broadcasts deep does not give you a slice of 3%. It gives you a slice of whatever is left when the big channel is offline, which is often close to nothing.

The audiences are not even in the same time zone

Scale each platform to its own daily peak and the three curves separate in a way that has nothing to do with size:

YouTube’s GTA audience peaks at 16:00 UTC. Kick’s peaks at 20:00 and Twitch’s at 23:00. Seven hours separate the red line’s best hour from the purple one’s.

That gap is the most useful thing in this post, because it reframes the question. Here is who actually accumulates YouTube’s GTA hours over thirty days, against how long they were live to do it:

YouTube creator	Language	Hours watched, 30d	Airtime
valkyrae	English	467,516	61.0h
jelool	Indonesian	336,819	20.6h
typical-gamer	English	266,100	28.1h
windah-basudara	Indonesian	240,010	8.4h
paji-is-live	Hindi	53,160	6.0h
ishowspeed	English	23,355	0.2h

Six of the fourteen YouTube creators in the 30-day top 100, by hours watched. Window ending 2026-10-03T04:00:52Z.

Across all fourteen, English takes 58.4% of YouTube’s GTA hours and Indonesian 37.6%. But look at the airtime column: several of the English entries are visits, not residencies. IShowSpeed earned 23,355 hours watched from twelve minutes in the category all month. Valkyrae’s 61 hours is real, and typical-gamer is a genuine GTA channel — but the pattern is that YouTube’s English GTA numbers lean on large creators dropping in, while jelool and windah-basudara are the ones holding the category open on ordinary days.

In this morning’s live census the split was starker still: 68.0% of YouTube’s GTA viewers were watching Hindi-language channels and 17.7% English.

Why the early peak, then? We think it is geography, and we are labelling that as inference rather than measurement — 16:00 UTC is 21:30 in India and 23:00 in western Indonesia, which is where an evening audience would be at that hour, and it is not any evening in the Americas or western Europe. We cannot prove causation from a viewer curve, and our country field is sparse enough that we will not pretend otherwise. What is measured is the timing and the languages. Our language breakdown shows the same split from the other direction.

So “YouTube or Twitch” has a better answer than either: it depends which audience your content is for. If you stream GTA in Hindi or Indonesian, YouTube is where a real share of that audience already is, and 3% understates what it means for you. If you stream in English and you are not already famous, you are choosing the platform where the category is three per cent of the hours, is held up by a handful of channels, and where one broadcast going offline halves the whole thing.

What the crowded platform actually offers

The honest case against Twitch is that it is full. That is true, and it is measurable. At the 04:01:42Z census, of 1,664 live GTA channels on Twitch:

Twitch GTA channels	Value
Channels live	1,664
Median viewers	5
Reached 10 viewers	32.2%
Reached 50 viewers	8.8%
Reached 100 viewers	5.3%

2026-10-03T04:01:42Z. Stable across all three censuses this morning: 32.2%, 32.1%, 32.2% at the ten-viewer line.

A median of five viewers is a brutal number and we have published it before. But 536 channels clearing ten viewers is a ladder, and a ladder with rungs is worth more than a bigger room you cannot get into. The sixty-eight per cent who do not clear ten are competing; on YouTube they would be invisible.

What this does not show

Our discovery depth differs by platform, and that single fact rules out the comparison most people would want. Kick’s public API returns the top 100 live channels in a category and ignores paging, YouTube’s search calls are rationed by a daily quota, and Twitch pages to around a thousand. So the channel counts and medians above are not comparable across platforms — Kick’s median of 76 viewers is mostly a statement about our collector, which is why there is no Kick column in that last table. Viewer totals are sound, because every count is confirmed against each platform’s official API; the count of small channels is not. The full picture is on our methodology page.

Three more limits worth stating plainly:

• We only see live. YouTube’s real argument is that a VOD keeps earning after the stream ends, and that an edited upload can find an audience for years. Our instrument is blind to all of it. If your plan is live-stream-now, clip-later, nothing here argues against YouTube — it argues against expecting the live category to find you.
• This is one game. GTA is a roleplay- and freeroam-heavy category whose audience sits disproportionately on Kick. A Minecraft or VALORANT measurement could come out differently, and we have not made one.
• Concurrent viewers include muted tabs, co-streams only count when the broadcast is categorised as GTA, and a thirty-day board ranked by average viewers flatters creators who visited the category briefly.

And the obvious third option: you do not have to choose only one. We measured what simulcasting actually buys and the second platform held a median of 21.6% of the combined audience — less than most people expect, but not nothing.

Cite this

Figures above come from luciastream’s own sampling of every live Grand Theft Auto broadcast on Kick, Twitch and YouTube at 60-second resolution. The thirty-day board covers the window ending 2026-10-03T04:00:52Z; the live censuses were taken at 04:01:42Z, 04:11:42Z and 04:12:40Z on 2026-10-03; the hourly curves cover 2026-10-02T04:00Z to 2026-10-03T03:59Z.

Permalink: https://luciastream.com/blog/should-you-stream-on-youtube-or-twitch/ · Live board: luciastream.com/live/ · Thirty-day leaderboard · How we measure