Female streamers are conquering Twitch
DURING a recent livestream, Maya Higa, 22, ate guacamole and chips while bantering with two of her housemates as they cooked quesadillas. Over the next 90 minutes, Higa grilled some vegetables and consulted on which pan ought to be used for frying. At one point, she provided her online viewers with an update on her young pet emu. ‘Stompy is good,’ said Higa. “I had her on stream yesterday.”
She wasn’t sure, she explained to one of her kitchen buddies, how much Stompy now weighed. But the lovable emu was definitely growing fast.
The same could be said of Higa’s livestreaming audience. In February, Higa burst into the top 200 most popular creators on Twitch. She now has 420,000 subscribers on the livestreaming site owned by Amazon.com, making her something of an anomaly in an industry known for male streamers playing video games and, to a lesser extent, female streamers nicknamed ‘hot-tub girls,’ who woo Twitch viewers by wearing skimpy swimwear and lounging in bathtubs.
Higa, by contrast, is part of a new wave of female streamers who are gaining prominence on Twitch and elsewhere in the industry while staying well clear of the jacuzzi scene.
Recently, YouTube creator Rachel ‘Valkyrae’ Hofstetter became the co-owner of 100 Thieves, an esports gaming organisation and brand. In April 2021, there were eight women in the top 200 streamers on Twitch up from just three a year earlier, according to StreamElements, a company that provides video tools for streamers and which represents Higa.
The number of top female streamers is growing now, in part, due to changing preferences on the platform.
During the third quarter of last year, a relatively new genre of livestreaming videos known as ‘just chatting’ – essentially live video diaries – eclipsed gamingrelated content to become the most popular category on Twitch. — Bloomberg