Analysis of Connectivity and Viewership between Twitch content
creators using Graph Visualization and Community Detection
Varun Deliwala
B.Tech(CSE)
Ahmedabad University
Ahmedabad University
Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India
Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India
shail.p1@ahduni.edu.in
varun.d@ahduni.edu.in
ABSTRACT
With the advent of the increase in content creators and
streamers on the social media and streaming platforms, the
connectivity between content creators has exponentially
increased and so has the need for analyzing the connectivity.
With concepts of social network analysis, analyzing such a
network would actually give new content creators info about
what to do and what not to, who to follow, and who should they
not follow.
KEYWORDS
Social Network Analysis, Visualization, Twitch, Community
Detection, Distribution Analysis.
ACM Reference format:
FirstName Surname, FirstName Surname, and FirstName Surname.
2018. Insert Your Title Here: Insert Subtitle Here. In Proceedings of ACM
Woodstock conference (WOODSTOCK’18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2
pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/1234567890
1 Introduction
Users, on a social media platform, are connected based on who
they follow and who follows them. For a streaming platform
like twitch which gives the live video streaming service that
focuses on video game live streaming, including broadcasts of
esports competitions, in addition to offering music broadcasts,
creative content, and "in real life" streams, the connection
between the two particular nodes would be based on the
follow/subscribing system but when it comes to being in the
same community, two particular streamers could be
considered to be in the same community based on the games
that they play and the type of content they bring out for the
public.
With online gaming booming through the years, along with-it
content creation has also grown exponentially. The viewership
has grown and so has the number of content creators who
make content on a daily basis has also grown substantially.
With a huge increase in numbers also came a demand to
analyze whether content creation is a short-term, low-risk,
Shail Patel Sahil Miskeen
B.Tech(CSE) B.Tech(CSE)
Ahmedabad University
Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India
sahil.m@ahduni.edu.in
high-return gig or is it actually gruesome for everyone, and
along with that also came the question, how are content
creators actually connected when it comes to creating similar
content.
The work aims at using social network analysis concepts to
solve a simple problem and then comparing the results that
have been created and analyze the visualized graph along. After
forming proper data modules and graphs from which proper
inferences can be made, the analysis is based on comparative
models. The results and hypothesis generated in the work are
based on a typical comparison-based approach for different
graphs for different datasets and then comparing the
variability of results over datasets so as to come to conclusions
like streamers from which language are most connected to new
streamers even though being veteran streamers and at the
same time, content viewers prefer which type of
content(mature/non-mature) in which language. Overall, we
aim on putting forward the results from a study that analyses
the network, checks which people are connected to which type
of people, and gives an overview of the current streaming scene
for 6 European languages.
2 Data Exploration
The dataset used is of streamers from 6 different languages,
namely, German, British English, Español, French, Portuguese
and Russian. For each of the languages, we are given 2 types of
files where one gives us the info about nodes while the other
one is giving us the info about the edges. The datasets have
edges that are directed in nature and don't have any attributes
like weights. The data overall doesn’t give us much except for
the graph and actually requires the creation of extra fields so as
to make the analysis possible in the first place. So, after
exploring the data, the need for creating new fields is created.
At the same time, extracting the traits of the nodes in a graph is
also required, which is possible by calling in-built networkx
functions, like degree and assortativity coefficients.
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Ahmedabad University ‘22, Ahmedabad, Gujarat
Table 1: Data details for the 6 different datasets of 6
different languages.
3 Process
The first thing which has to be done with a dataset that is not
particularly big but spread is to sectionalize it for different
fields. The dataset requires the implementation of the fields
such as days_compare and views_compare so as to
categorically assign different nodes into different sets so as to
better differentiate between them. Now to differentiate a node
into three different categories of “New”, “Mid” and “Old”, a
metric has to be set such that we aren't particularly making a
group niche. So the metric used was presuming that the
distribution given would be normal in nature. So, the mid
consisted of 1 standard deviation from the mean on both sides.
That is nearly equal to 68% of the total data. The remaining
data on both sides were given the category of New and Old
respectively, New for the case that the days are lesser than
(mean – standard deviation) and old for the case that the days
for the nodes are more than (mean + standard deviation).
For the case of views, we simply divided it into two parts, the
first part including the nodes that had views lesser than
average and the second part consisting of nodes that had views
more than average. Once we received 2 new fields
days_compare and views_compare, we were able to start the
basic analysis. Then using networkx, we were able to append
the degree for each node to the nodes table for each of the
datasets.
Figure 1: Graph visualized for the French dataset using,
Gephi where the color is given by Modularity class and the
size of the nodes is given by the number of views.
Once the data was preprocessed and uploaded on Gephi, we
were able to analyze different data sets in different formats,
where the node size and color could be altered according to
need, and the degree range for the visualized graph could be
edited. The most prerequisite analysis was based on the
modularity class distribution. Using Louvain Algorithms which
is inbuilt in Gephi, we are able to segregate data into modularity
classes. The algorithm was originally used as a fast community
unfolding algorithm for large networks where the approach
would be based on modularity. This approach tries to maximize
the expected number of edges and the actual number of edges
in a community. After actually visualizing the graph and
analyzing it, we aimed at drawing conclusions about the
different cases and at the same time plotting the distribution
for cases like degree distribution for different nodes around
different age classes (based on days_compare).
Along with analyzing the traits of the nodes, we also analyzed
the assortativity of all the graphs and tier reciprocities using
python and networkx. Assortativity gave us that not a single
graph amongst all had nodes going back to similar nodes but
rather all the nodes wanted to connect with dis-similar nodes.
The reciprocity for all the graphs turned out to be 0 which gave
the hint that the edges don't traverse back to the source node
of the first edge at all, throughout the whole graph.
Table 2: Assortativity coefficient and Reciprocity of the
graphs formed by the datasets.
4 Comparative studies and Findings
4.1 Modularity/Views
The first comparison that we did was of modularity class v/s
the views that a streamer got. Here we wanted to understand if
there is any relation in the communities and the maximum
views. This relation could help us deduce whether or not one
single community is responsible for high viewership or in
simple words what type of community is more popular.
4.1.1 Results
We found out that the top streamers are spread over different
modularity classes in the British English dataset and even in the
French dataset. We can see that the same fact is true for the
Russian data as well but there are a few highly dominating
modularity classes as well thus we conclude that they have a
good spread but few modularity classes are much more
dominating. While for the case of the Portuguese dataset it is
clearly visible that a particular modularity class is the most
dominating. Thus we can say that top streamer are spread over
different modularity classes in some cases but in some cases
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predominantly streamers from some communities particularly
have a lot of viewers.
Figure 2: Comparing different cases in different datasets
via Graphs (modularity class vs views)(RU and PTBR)
Figure 3: Comparing different cases in different datasets
via Graphs (modularity class vs views)(FR and ENGB)
4.2 Modularity/Days
Here we compared the modularity and the days since they have
been on the platform. This would allow us to understand how
different communities and different aged streamers are
connected and if any community had dominance by any
particular age segment.
Figure 4: Comparing different cases in different datasets
via Graphs (modularity class vs days)(RU and PTBR)
Figure 5: Comparing different cases in different datasets
via Graphs (modularity class vs days)(FR and ENGB)
4.2.1 Results
We found out that there is no bias for any of the languages when
considering the time spent by the streamers on the platform for
any particular community. We successfully found out that all
the streamers are spread over different modularity classes
regardless of which language they are streaming in.
4.3 days_compare/Views
The days_compare refers to new, mid, and old creators. We
compared it with the views which would allow us to
understand which age group might have better dominance on
the basis of the parameters of the views.
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Ahmedabad University ‘22, Ahmedabad, Gujarat
Figure 6: Comparing different cases in different datasets
via Graphs (days_compare vs views)(ENGB, FR, and DE)
4.3.1 Results
Here we deduced that in the case of English the big leagues are
mainly dominated by the older streamers, for French, the
domination spreads a bit and for Deutsche, the spread
increases substantially we cannot figure out which particular
age group dominates the most. We concluded that Deutsche is
the most accepting and treats without the bias of how old or
new the streamer is whereas it is the exact opposite for the
English.
4.4 days/views_compare
The view_compare has been divided into two parts namely high
and low views. We compared that with the number of days to
get the inference about how the days can show us the
dominance of the new and older streamers.
Figure 7: Comparing different cases in different datasets
via Graphs (views_compare vs days)(ENGB, FR, and DE)
4.4.1 Results
Here as we compared the two we could deduce that for English
again the older streamers received the most views compared to
the newer streamers this reduces a bit in the case of the French
dataset and then significantly decreases for the Deutsche
dataset where we can see the changes very evidently through
the graph.
4.5 Mature/Non-Mature Content
The mature v/s non-mature content was described as having
binary values and by having them segregated we tried to
understand using a simple bar graph whether or not the people
liked the mature content over immature content. This could
again help the streamers understand what type of content
could work more for them.
Figure 8: Mature vs Non-Mature content for Different
datasets
4.5.1 Results
We successfully found out that people who posted more of the
non-mature content got more views and it was true for every
dataset but in the case of Deutsche we could see that the
difference between mature and non-mature content was not
like the others. The difference was very less when compared to
the others so we can say that they have more tolerance for the
mature content compared to other languages.
4.6 Degree Distribution for the nodes of
different degrees
The nodes here are divided into dNew, dMid, and dOld. We then
compared these degrees for all the sources with all the targets
to find out which degree has the most dominant among the
three.
Figure 9: Degree Distribution for the nodes of different
degrees (Russian, French, Portuguese and German)
4.6.1 Results
After analyzing the degree distribution, we found out that for
all the languages except for Russian and Portuguese, the dMid
was dominating and also increased more gradually than the
other two parameters. If we do not consider the case of these
two (Outliers) we could conclude that the Mid-aged streamers
have more engagement because it could be possible that the
new streamers are yet to get their fan base and for the older
streamers it could be that their strategies might have been
outdated and hence the mid-aged streamers tend to dominate.
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Also for the two outliers, we think that this anomaly could mean
that maybe these two languages might be new to the platform
itself and it is still budding there thus the new streamers are
getting more attention because the platform not being more
popular than the older streamers might have been inactive as
well.
4.7 Nodes of different degrees/dNew
Next we went on to analyze which degree was more dominant
when we tried to be more specific here namely for dNew nodes.
We wanted to understand the relationship between all the
streamers and get a better understanding of the age group
which has the most engagement and better connections. We did
the same process for dMid and dOld as well to be more case-
specific and find some interesting results.
4.7.1 Results
Here we surprisingly found the results to be the same across
the languages apart from the two outliers: Russia and
Portuguese. The mid-aged streamers had the most impactful
results and the graph clearly indicates that they have a
significant and gradual increase which proves that the mid-
aged streamers have better connections.
4.8 No of streamers/days_compare
We also categorized the numeric data of how many streamers
were into which category of age class so we compared the
days_compare with the number of streamers in each category
by using a simple bar graph.
Figure 10: Mature vs Non-Mature content for the different
datasets
4.8.1 Results
The result of this analysis here is that we can pinpoint the
numbers of the content creators according to which age section
they belong to. It is very much evident that the mid-aged
streamers were the most for all the languages and again not
much difference could be seen between the new and old
streamers.
4.9 No of views/days_compare
No of the views had the total of the views which we compared
with the days_cmpre to get an exact idea of how many views
were associated with which age category of the streamers. We
did this to again understand which age category is more
dominant in accordance with the views that they are getting.
Figure 11: No of views/days_compare for datasets DE,
ENGB, ES, and FR and the outliers being circled.
.
4.9.1 Results
Even though the above analysis suggested that there was a
significant difference between the mid-aged streamers and the
old-aged streamers this analysis proved that the views still
were very much close to each other when we talk about the
mid-aged and the old-aged streamers. The new streamers had
very less views in all the cases. In fact, we saw that in the case
of the English dataset the old-aged streamers had more views
than the mid-aged streamers which means that even though
the count of them is less the dominance is very high for the
older streamers. While for the case of French data we saw that
the new streamers received a better count of views with
respect to the other languages so we could say that they are
much more experimental and are supportive of the new
streamers. So this proved to us that the count of streamers in a
particular age group could not imply how many views they
would get, people do like to connect to veteran streamers as
much as the mid-level streamers.
5 Hypothesis
Hypothesis 1: - Based on how the human mind thinks, we
hypothesized that old streamers must have a high connection
and a more significant degree associated with them. These
higher degrees of connection must be leading to a more
significant number of views than any other age category of
streamers. The result of which has been discussed in the
conclusion provided.
Hypothesis 2: If a more significant number of streamers
belong to a particular age group, the age group with the highest
counts of streamers would overall have the highest cumulative
views. The results of this hypothesis are described in the
conclusion stated below.
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Ahmedabad University ‘22, Ahmedabad, Gujarat

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comparative study. This has been based on the anomaly that

these regions, in particular, have a higher degree associated
with the newer nodes than the older and the mid-range nodes
(based on the days they have been on the platform).

We found out that the views need to be divided into broadly

four different categories (low, mid, high, and very high). The
study shows a large gap between the number of old and mid-
streamers. The mid streamers are more in number by almost 3
in every region observed. However, the views attributed to the
old and the mid streamers are almost the same, and, in some
cases, the total views for the old streamers are even higher than
the views procured by the mid streamers. Therefore, due to this
observation, we concluded that a fourth category needs to be
added to effectively compare the views associated with the
different ages the streamers have been on the platform.

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