New on YouTube Live: The Top Fans Leaderboard
YouTube is rolling out a new feature called the Live Leaderboard for Top Fans, designed to boost livestream engagement. This system ranks the top 50 most active viewers during a livestream. The top 3 viewers earn a special badge next to their name in the chat.
How Viewers Earn Points
Viewers gain “experience points” (XP) by actively taking part in your livestream. They can check their points by clicking a crown icon at the top of the chat. Points are given for:
- Sending chat messages: This earns points (with a cap).
- Sending Super Chats.
- Sending Super Stickers.
- Sending gifts: (Currently US only, and only on vertical livestreams).
YouTube has daily and weekly spending limits for paid items (up to $500 USD per day and $2,000 USD per week combined for Super Chats, Super Stickers, and Gifts).Viewers are automatically included but can opt out via their YouTube privacy settings.
Leaderboards: YouTube vs. Twitch
YouTube says its leaderboard makes things more fun and rewarding for fans, helping them get noticed and build community. To see its full impact, it’s helpful to compare it to Twitch’s leaderboards:
- Twitch Leaderboards: Streamers have separate leaderboards for Top Cheerers (Bits), Top Gifters (gifted subscriptions), and Top Clippers (most-viewed clips).
- Customization: These can be set to reset daily, weekly, monthly, or be all-time.
- Rewards: The top 3 on each Twitch leaderboard get a channel-level chat badge that stays as long as they hold their spot in the cycle.
YouTube’s leaderboard is different because it combines all types of engagement—both paid and free (chat messages)—into one real-time list, showing up to 50 “top fans.” One point to note is that YouTube’s top 3 badges only last during the livestream, which might not encourage long-term support as much as Twitch’s badges. We’ll see how this new feature works out for communities and creators.
Pete’s Content Corner
Delve into my weekly selection of content creation highlights—handpicked videos, podcasts, and tweets that promise to captivate, educate, and entertain.
- A really insightful Guardian article explores the reality of creator burnout, touching on the constant “on” demands and unforgiving algorithms. It’s a struggle many of us, myself included, can definitely relate to.
- Following up on our poll last week about AI training ethics, Cloudflare has rolled out a “pay-per-crawl” system. This allows website owners to charge AI agents for accessing their content, giving creators more control and a path to compensation.
- Substack is beefing up its livestreaming features, adding automatic clip generation, direct YouTube auto-posting for top clips, and smarter stream scheduling. These are solid updates for discoverability and workflow.
I’m always glad to see YouTube building out more livestream-specific features. It shows they’re continuing to improve the platform for both creators and viewers, which is always a win in my book.
Oh, and just a quick reminder about those 30 free webcam filters we mentioned at the top – if you signed up last week and didn’t receive them due to that glitch, just reply to this email, and I’ll make sure they’re sent your way!
Thanks, as always, for taking the time to read Stream Report.
Pete ✌️
