Give thanks and host during #Hostgiving!
As the year comes to a close, and Thanksgiving looms, we’re all reflecting and giving thanks to those we appreciate. So it’s the perfect time to spread some love to your fellow Twitch streamers by participating in #Hostgiving, from now until 11/30! You can easily produce 10% more minutes watched for your community by setting up auto host [1], so get out there and give thanks! And when streamers get hosted they pay it forward: 70% of streamers who get hosted on a given day go on to host someone else that day. It’s an incredible circle of giving.
Not only is auto hosting a great way to show appreciation to those who have supported you, it’s an effective tool for growing minutes watched. Here’s how you benefit: using auto host, you can expect something like 10% growth in minutes watched if you get 10 of your peers to auto host you. As you’d expect, each additional channel auto hosting you helps. If you auto host someone, the likelihood that you will be hosted will increase. So what better way to get your peers to show you auto host love than by adding their channels to your list? You’d be surprised how far the gesture goes.
We’re even making it easier to know who to add to your list. Starting today, you’ll get an email any time you’re added to someone’s auto host list. To prevent you from receiving too many notifications, you’ll only get the email when the channel auto hosting you has at least 10% of your followers. Like always, you can also opt out of getting these emails via your Settings.
Need some help setting up? Here’s a detailed article about how to set up and use auto host. Be sure to check out some of our best practices below.
Auto hosting best practices:
The magic number is 10: start by adding at least 10 of your peers to your auto host list
Only auto host channels that you are comfortable sharing on your channel. Remember, it’s your brand!
Getting a much larger channel to auto host you would be fantastic, but you’d probably find more success hosting channels with similar viewership as yours.
Manually hosting someone when your broadcast ends is still the best experience for your viewers since auto hosting has a delay.
End each broadcast by introducing the person you will be hosting and then manually host them with the command “/host
” in your chat If you know the streamer and have their permission, you can even take it a step further and raid their chat with your viewers.
[1] They are NOT getting 10% more minutes watched on their content. They are producing a lot more hosted minutes and giving them out to their communities. Heavy adopters: auto host similar channels or more than 10 channels. This effect size makes sense, because auto host reclaims a large portion of the viewership that offline channels were leaving on the table.
By Brittany Brown, Sam Brown, Danny Hernandez, and Annie Berrones