YouTube Tests Engagement Leaderboard for Livestreams

YouTube’s trying out a new way to encourage livestream engagement, this time through gamification, with an engagement leaderboard to be displayed within some live streams.

As you can see in this example, displayed on the EXPOSUREEE YouTube channel, the new leaderboard will list your most engaged livestream viewers, ranked by XP, which relates to how many comments, Super Chat, Super Stickers, and/or gifts that each viewer has submitted during a stream.

As explained by YouTube:

“Viewers earn points for engaging with streams and will see a crown icon at the top of the chat with the points they’ve earned from engaging on the creator’s live streams. When they click on the crown icon, they’ll be taken to the leaderboard to see the top 50 most engaged viewers on that channel.”

The top three most-engaged viewers will get a badge that’ll appear next to their name on livestreams, which could help them get noticed by the creator during the stream.

It’s a fairly simple way to boost livestream engagement, by adding a gaming-like element to how viewers are displayed. And given that the vast majority of YouTube livestreams are gaming related, it makes sense that this would work with the audience for such, tapping into that competitive element in order to prompt more viewers into action.

Which is good for YouTube, in that it’ll drive more interaction, as well as purchases of its add-on chat features, and good for creators, in that they’ll also get a cut of any of those add-on purchases.

It just seems a little cheap, right? Like, this “ranking” makes no difference, there’s no reason for people to compete on such, other than maybe getting the attention of the streamers.

But it’ll work, so…

YouTube says that it’s launching this as an experiment “with a small group of viewers,” while viewers will be able to opt out of appearing in the leaderboard if they choose.