Twitch Top Categories

Get a snapshot of the top Twitch categories in live-viewer order, each with viewer counts, follower counts and genre tags. Built for anyone tracking where attention on Twitch is going: game publishers watching their launch against competitors, analysts measuring category share, marketers picking where to show up, and trend desks spotting rising games early.

What you can do with it

• Rank the directory — get the top categories by live viewers as clean rows, up to 100 per run.
• Track a launch — re-run on a schedule and watch your game's viewers and rank move against competitors.
• Size a market — viewer and follower counts per category quantify attention game by game.
• Discover rising games — diff daily snapshots to spot categories climbing the ranking.
• Feed a dashboard — one row per category with stable IDs, ready to join with your other data.

What you get

One row per category, in live-viewer order. Abridged sample of a single record:

{
  "categoryId": "509658",
  "name": "Just Chatting",
  "displayName": "Just Chatting",
  "viewersCount": 301513,
  "followersCount": 53075589,
  "boxArtUrl": "https://static-cdn.jtvnw.net/ttv-boxart/509658-285x380.jpg",
  "tags": ["IRL"],
  "categoryUrl": "https://www.twitch.tv/directory/category/just-chatting",
  "collectedAt": "2026-09-14T09:00:00.000Z"
}

Every row carries collectedAt, the moment of its snapshot. Schedule the actor hourly, daily or weekly and diff the datasets on collectedAt to build your own 24h / weekly / monthly trend views — Twitch only serves the live directory, so history is built from your snapshots, not requested from it.

Input reference

Setting	Type	Default	What it does
Max categories	whole number	50	How many of the top categories to collect, in live-viewer order. Maximum 100 — each run returns a single snapshot of the directory.
Min viewers	whole number	0	Only keep categories with at least this many live viewers. 0 keeps everything.
Min followers	whole number	0	Only keep categories with at least this many total followers. 0 keeps everything. Combine both to find categories that are big and hot right now.
Sort by	VIEWERS / FOLLOWERS	VIEWERS	VIEWERS keeps the live directory order; FOLLOWERS re-ranks the snapshot by total followers, so each choice returns a different top list.

Output fields

Field	Type	Description
categoryId	text	Stable numeric Twitch ID for the category.
name	text	Category name.
displayName	text	Category display name.
viewersCount	number	Live viewers in the category at collection time.
followersCount	number	Total followers of the category.
boxArtUrl	text	Category artwork image.
tags	list of text	Genre tags such as Shooter or IRL.
categoryUrl	text	Clean link to the category directory page.
collectedAt	text	ISO timestamp of the snapshot this row came from — group by it to build trends over time.

Pricing

You pay per category row, with no monthly minimum.

What you are charged for	Price
Category row — one row added to your dataset	$1.50 per 1,000

Worked example. A run that collects 100 categories costs 100 × $0.0015 = $0.15. A daily run collecting 100 categories is about $0.15 per run, roughly $4.50 a month.

Limits & what this actor cannot do

• Each run returns a single snapshot of the top categories (up to 100) — deeper pages of the directory are not collected.
• Rows are a snapshot at the moment of collection; viewers and rankings keep changing afterwards.
• Fields a category does not show come back empty rather than guessed.
• Speed depends on Twitch's own response times; no fixed throughput is promised.
• Twitch's terms govern automated access. You are responsible for using the data lawfully and in line with the source site's terms, and for handling any personal data in line with applicable privacy law.

FAQ

Do I need a Twitch account? No. The actor reads only what Twitch shows in its directory — press start.

How many categories can I collect per run? Up to 100, in live-viewer order.

Can I schedule it? Yes. Schedule it hourly, daily or weekly from the Apify console, and each run writes a fresh dataset you can compare against the last.

Why do I get the same categories every run? The directory is live, and the very top barely moves. Change the picture with other settings: sort by FOLLOWERS instead of VIEWERS, raise Min viewers / Min followers to cut the long tail, or diff scheduled snapshots on collectedAt to catch climbers.

Is the data complete? It covers the top of the directory at collection time. Smaller categories below the snapshot cut-off are not included.