Units and metrics
Concurrent viewers
Last updated by The PanelCompare editorial team
Why does concurrent viewers matter to a buyer?
The unit is a slot-hour and the catalogue pretends it is a count. The same 1,000 slots cost roughly ten times more for four hours than for a few minutes, so two panels quoting the same per-1,000 figure can be an order of magnitude apart. TikTok makes it plainest: $0.80 buys a 15-minute session and $13–$18 buys a full hour (PanelCompare domain research, 2026-09-06). Divide by hours before comparing anything.
It is also worth separating concurrent from peak. What you buy is concurrency — slots held at the same time — while what a platform records and displays afterwards is usually a peak figure derived from it. Concurrency is what feeds live recommendation surfaces, which is the actual payoff, and it is why the order has to be placed in the first minutes of a broadcast rather than whenever is convenient. Refill is effectively unavailable: only 6 of 30,042 TikTok live services carry it.
How does concurrent viewers show up in a price list?
Session length lives in the service name (“[1 Hour]”, “[15 Min]”, “[12 Months]”) and is the entire price story. Chat is a separate and often dearer SKU — Twitch chatters run $1.14–$1.54 per thousand for an hour of automated chat and $14.00 for context-aware messages, and are the most detectable of the live services (PanelCompare domain research, 2026-09-06).
Long contracts are where the numbers become absurd if the unit is ignored: Twitch live viewers reach $2,242–$3,543 per thousand for six months and $4,233–$6,689 for twelve (PanelCompare domain research, 2026-09-06). Those are not expensive viewers; they are a year of held slots.
| Platform | Session length | Rate per 1,000 slots |
|---|---|---|
| TikTok Live | 15 minutes | $0.80 |
| TikTok Live | 1 hour | $13.00–$18.00 |
| Twitch | 1 hour | $1.78 |
| Twitch | 3 hours | $5.28 |
| YouTube Live | 30 minutes | $0.10 |
| YouTube Live | 60 minutes | $0.20 |
Source: Live-viewer rows observed across panel catalogues, recorded in PanelCompare domain research, 2026-09-06.
Think this definition is wrong?
Terminology in this market is set by the panels that use it, and it moves. If a panel uses concurrent viewers to mean something other than what is written here, send us the listing and we will either correct the definition or record the variant. The process is on the about page.