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Comment by Jensson | Hacker News Reader

Twitch has mostly male viewers, many of them like watching sexy women, not so many like watching sexy men. Makes sense then that popular sexy content on twitch is mostly women.

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I think this is a bit reductive because it glosses over the fact that the two trends you cite (more male viewers and more sexual content catering towards larger audiences) aren't independent; how do we know that the reason there aren't more female viewers isn't related to the fact that content (sexual or otherwise) isn't attempting to appeal to them? I think it's a fair question to ask whether more sexualized content from men would cause the distribution of viewers to change; if it wouldn't, I think it's also a fair question to ask why that's the case.

It wouldn't, and there are all sorts of marketing data on why that is. Advertisers and marketers don't study these things for science, they study it for money.

Romance is a different thing, but that's something that doesn't lend itself to a Twitch stream.

I don't think it makes sense trying to attract female audiences by constructing the exact same thing that appeals to men but hoping to just switch the polarity. It didn't work for Hollywood (women stayed away in droves from the female superhero movies because... it turns out... they're just not that in to them), and it wouldn't work on Twitch.

I didn't realize that the audience skewed so heavily male (65%/35%). Since women are the majority of gamers, it really seems like leaving money on the table not to attract more women as viewers.

> women are the majority of gamers

you mean like all games?

ime twitch is mostly pc-gaming and pc-platform is male-heavy

>women are the majority of gamers

Only if you include the likes of Angry Birds and other casual phone games, none of which is streamed on Twitch.

Twitch is console and (as geraldhh said) PC gaming, which is mostly men.

Mobile gaming is nearly 50/50. https://www.blog.udonis.co/mobile-marketing/mobile-games/mod... So is PC gaming. https://www.circana.com/intelligence/infographics/2023/what-... Among consoles, only the PS5 has more than a 10-point spread.

i guess we were both wrong

I would be interested to see if the 'committed gamers' category from this model, which on mobile is 50/50 between genders holds for PC and console gaming. I would expect men to have higher average hours engaged in gaming and watching gaming than women for non-mobile games.

Happy to be proven wrong though as this may well just be a bias.

Breaking it down by time, men spend close to twice as much time on leisure computer use and gaming. Nowadays most people play a game once in a while, whether that's Farmville or Wordle, so time provides a much more useful measurement than simply "have you played a game".

https://www.statista.com/statistics/502144/average-daily-tim...

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