Growing Creative Communities

As any artist will tell you, creativity and experimentation go hand in hand. And in that spirit, Twitch Creative is a place where we are experimenting with new ideas, products, and initiatives. It’s our own little test kitchen/not-so-secret lab where we listen to the community, identify issues and solve them. One of the biggest challenges we’re trying to solve is broadcaster discoverability and ensuring that you can find the content that you want to watch.

One experiment on Creative was using voting in the Food channel. The community is able to vote upon which shows were hosted on our channel, providing viewers with an awesome way to discover new content together. Now we are taking another step to make it even easier for you discover broadcasters that share your same creative interests.

Introducing Communities. Starting today, we are updating the Creative directory to be a landing page for categories like painting, cosplay, music, and more. This is designed to help you discover new streamers that are creating the things you’re interested in. Anyone can suggest a Community to be added to our directory and we will accept the most active and diverse ones.

Communities Spotlight Beta

As a way to promote and highlight Creative streamers, we are creating a new Spotlight feature which we are testing on the music, gamedev, cosplay, and painting Communities, with a plan to roll it out into others in the near future.

It works like this: viewers can vote using emotes on a few streams randomly selected from that Community. The channel with the most votes gets the Spotlight and that streamer will be featured on the Spotlight for a period of time.

We’re excited to hear your feedback on this new feature, so please let us know what you think right here.

A new community: #ArtStation

With the launch of Communities, we’re also happy to announce that ArtStation, a leading portfolio site for artists and industry professionals, is partnering with Twitch. With this partnership when you link your Twitch and ArtStation accounts and you stream in the #artstation Community, your channel will appear on the ArtStation home page via the Streams tab. We’ll also be working together to create some best-practices for artists looking to improve their streams.

For more information on Communities, visit the Creative FAQ.