Transparency

Methodology

What the numbers on this site mean, how they are collected, and where they fall short. A tracker is only as useful as its willingness to say what it cannot see.

How viewers are counted

Every tracked channel is polled on a fixed interval and its concurrent viewer count is stored as a timestamped sample. Nothing is estimated or modelled — a figure on this site is either a value a platform reported, or an arithmetic result derived from those values.

Average viewers is the mean of all samples taken while a channel was live, weighted by airtime — so a two-hour stream counts twice as much as a one-hour stream at the same size. Peak viewers is the single highest sample observed, never a smoothed maximum. Hours watched is the sum of (viewers × sample interval) across a session.

Sampling rates

Not every channel is sampled at the same rate. Polling every live channel every minute would be both rate-limit-infeasible and wasteful, since the long tail contributes a very small share of total watch time. Channels are tiered:

Tier	Interval	Effect
Top 1,000 by viewers	60 seconds	Peaks accurate to the minute
Next 4,000	5 minutes	Short spikes may be missed
Long tail	15 minutes	Averages reliable, peaks approximate

Per-platform coverage

Kick

High confidence

Source: Official public API v1
Sampling: Top 100 by category every 60s, plus every tracked channel by slug
Caveat: The public API returns the top 100 live channels in a category and ignores paging parameters, so the long tail is covered by a persistent creator roster rather than by paging the category. Viewer totals are barely affected — the top 100 hold almost all of Kick's GTA audience — but the count of small channels is an undercount.

Twitch

High confidence

Source: Official Helix API
Sampling: Top ~1,000 by category every 60s, plus every tracked channel by ID every 5 min
Caveat: Category pagination is capped, so the long tail is covered by a persistent creator roster rather than by paging the category.

YouTube

Medium confidence

Source: Official Data API v3
Sampling: Adaptive: largest streams every 60s, mid-tail every 5 min, tail every 15 min
Caveat: YouTube has no game category, so new channels are found by searching for the game's name — which means a YouTube stream is discovered largely because its title or description says so. Counts of YouTube channels are sound; statistics about what YouTube titles contain are not, because the search picked them for their wording. The API also allots a fixed daily quota and search is by far its most expensive call, so discovery is rationed. Channels we already track are checked through YouTube's own public channel feeds, which cost no quota, and every viewer count is then confirmed against the official API.

Trovo

High confidence

Source: Official open platform API
Sampling: Category poll every 5 min
Caveat: Small absolute audience; included for completeness.

Known limitations

Collection gaps are recorded, not hidden.If a collector goes down, that window is stored as a gap and charts render a break rather than a run of zeros. A flat line at zero would misrepresent an outage as an audience collapse.
Language is the stream's, not the creator's.Language boards use the language tag set on the broadcast. A bilingual creator can appear under different languages on different days.
Country is the broadcaster's, not the audience's.Regional boards group by where the creator is based. They say nothing about where the viewers are.
Viewer counts are platform-reported.Platforms define and filter concurrent viewers differently, and none publish their exact methodology. Cross-platform totals are directionally useful, not exact.
Channel counts are not comparable across platforms.Each platform is discovered as deeply as its API allows: Twitch pages to roughly the top 1,000 in a category, Kick returns only the top 100, and YouTube's search is rationed by a daily quota. Total viewers survive this well, because the largest channels hold most of the audience. Anything with a channel count in the denominator does not — average viewers per channel, medians and percentiles are sound within a platform and misleadingbetween them, since the platform with the deepest discovery looks like the one with the most small streamers.
Title content is comparable across Twitch and Kick, but not YouTube.Twitch and Kick are discovered by the game’s category, so what a stream is called has no bearing on whether we find it. YouTube has no equivalent category and is discovered by searching for the game’s name, so the streams we see there are disproportionately the ones that named the game in the title. Any measurement of what YouTube titles contain is therefore partly a measurement of our own search query, and we do not publish one.
The VOD board is not filtered by game.Live streams are matched to a category on every sample, so the live boards, sessions and every viewership figure on this site cover Grand Theft Auto only. Recordings are not: the platform endpoints that list a channel's past broadcasts do not report which game each one covers, so /vods/ ranks the recent archive of the creators we track rather than their GTA broadcasts alone. Clips are unaffected — those are fetched per category.
Embeds are not re-hosted.No video is copied or cached. Players are the platforms' own embeds, and clicking through counts toward the creator on their own platform.