TL;DR Takeaways by Hatchet:
- Stream Hatchet is now Hatchet: Creator Marketing Analytics with expanded data across not just live streaming, but socials too (incl. Instagram and X)
- Our services are expanding, with a first login experience that tailors recommendations to your needs and AI Smart Search to translate plain-language requests into filtered results
- Everything is in one place now: You can discover creators, research the market, build your community, and report on your creator marketing success all via Hatchet
Yes, we’re Hatchet now! If you’re reading this article just as it’s come out, then we hope you’re enjoying the shiny new rebrand: New logo, new colours, new aesthetic, and a brilliant new website. Seriously, did you notice that load speed? Wow. Just load a few pages over and over and you’ll feel like you’re whizzing through cyberspace.
But this isn’t just a new coat of paint and a streamlined website. Nor is dropping the “Stream” and becoming simply “Hatchet” some vain attempt to join the edgy one-word tech club. No, this rebrand is all about communicating a fundamental change in how we view the online landscape. We want to share our vision with you so, in this article, we’re plainspeak walking you through what’s changing with Hatchet, why it’s changing, and what this means for you.
- Why We Changed to Hatchet: The Full Creator Landscape
- What’s New with Hatchet (and What’s The Same)
- How Hatchet Works: End-to-End Creator Marketing
Why “Hatchet”? The Shift from Channel Discovery to Creator Discovery
You may not be interested in some philosophical breakdown of why our company is rebranding: If you’re just looking to find out what cool new features will be at your disposal, then more power to you (just skip a little further down the article). But we feel understanding the “why” behind our rebrand will enable you to get the most out of Hatchet. Put simply: Hatchet is now the single nexus through which you interact with the creator landscape. Instead of viewing our app as a series of discrete tabs providing access to an invisible database, Hatchet is how you fluidly navigate the online creator space to find insights and act strategically.
To achieve this new status as a “one-stop shop” for creator marketing, we had to rethink how we view the creator landscape. Previously, in our role as the experts of live streaming, we tracked different channels across different platforms to provide minute-to-minute data on their reach, engagement, and sentiment. This was a fantastic way to build a data platform, neatly segmenting different sections of the landscape into comprehensible chunks which you could filter down through. You could zoom in to an individual channel, or zoom out and look at trends across different games, platforms, or events.
Sounds awesome, right? It is! But focusing on the channel level, while satisfying from a categorization POV, ignored the realities of how audiences interact with creators online. A viewer doesn’t just watch their favourite streamer on Twitch: They also follow that streamer on Instagram, they might be part of the community for that streamer’s main game on X, and maybe they also check out products promoted by that creator. Looking solely at a creator’s primary channel in isolation doesn’t fully reflect that creator’s online footprint.
With Hatchet, we’re now taking a more holistic view of creators that encompasses all of their online activity to provide a more robust, nuanced understanding of their impact. We still have the most precise, accurate channel data fuelling these insights, but now we’re maximizing its potential by combining and cross-referencing it with all of the other data we have per creator.
Hatchet then goes one step further: We tune our creator insights to your unique needs. You tell us what you’re looking for, and we surface the most useful information for your situation. Because we now have this holistic view of creator discovery, the recommendations we make come with complete context built in. So that’s the vision: Hatchet cuts through the noise of platforms, trendy topics and audience chatter to provide concise insights and relevant creator recommendations. Now, let’s show you how we do that…
What’s New with Hatchet: Expanded Data and End-to-End Creator Marketing
New Data on Offer
Let’s start with the obvious big changes under Hatchet. We no longer solely do streaming platforms: Our coverage extends to social platforms like Instagram and X as well. This is the key point, and why we dropped the “Stream” from our name: We wanted our new name to embody our expanded offering. Greater platform coverage means a wider view of the creator landscape, which means more context when making creator marketing decisions.
Keep in mind that this socials data adds to our already expanded list of streaming platforms. Over the past few years we’ve diligently covered new streaming platforms including Kick, Chzzk, and SOOP (post-split). Most recently, we’ve been presenting TikTok LIVE data, a previously underrated live-streaming platform that has really shown its pull among non-gaming lifestyle content and mobile game content. In fact in H1 2026, TikTok LIVE accounted for 28.8% of ALL live-streaming viewership (that’s even including YouTube Non-Gaming).
On that topic: From now on we’ll be presenting YouTube Non-Gaming viewership alongside all other live-streaming viewership. We’d historically left it out of most analyses, but we now feel that including the impact of non-gaming channels like news and music stations better represents the rich panoply of live-streaming content. In that spirit, we’ll be more clearly and consistently covering both non-gaming and gaming content, and clearly signposting the difference as relevant.
Additional Creator Marketing Features & Insights
Aside from our expanded data, we’ve simultaneously launched a couple of new features that simplify creator marketing. These continue the journey we started with our Creator Communities features back in March, allowing you to personalize the Hatchet app to suit your needs.
To start, we have our first login experience: A simple start-up step for new customers where you can personalize the app. Let us know what you’re planning on accomplishing with Hatchet, and we can put the data you need front and centre. The process takes just a couple of minutes, and also allows you to visually personalize the app by, for example, selecting the filters most relevant to you or switching on Dark Mode.
We’re also introducing AI Smart Search to creator discovery: Type in what you want in regular language and Hatchet automatically sets filters to match and surface the most relevant creators. Looking for a mid-sized creator that creates sports content? An up-and-comer with a big presence on Kick? A gaming creator with an esports-centric following? Type it in and a curated list of creators will pop up that you can sort, skim, and select from.
Along with these new features come a number of quality of life improvements:
- Toggles, filters, and sliders are now generally more intuitive, flexible, and consistent across different sections of the app
- All of our insights across blogs, reports, and case studies are neatly arranged for easier searching, giving you the reading material to become a creator landscape expert
- There’s a new coat of paint over everything, showcasing the new branding and a cleaner aesthetic that reflects our “less chaos” mentality
What’s NOT Changing
Basically, everything else about Hatchet will remain the same. Game Discovery, Groups, Esports and Events tracking: All of your favourite features for gaining insights into the online landscape will still be available, it’s just that they’re now also fuelling our creator marketing features.
Other features that we’ve consistently pursued and will continue to offer include:
- Flagging suspicious activity and removing botted audiences to provide real, verified data
- Analyzing stream chats to gauge viewer engagement and sentiment, plus brand and/or game mentions
- In-depth game data categorization, including new release comparisons, genre breakdowns, and co-streaming impact for esports events
How Hatchet Works: The 4-Step Creator Marketing Lifecycle
How does this all piece together? Our newest features enhance the creator marketing lifecycle, making it more accessible than ever. Come equipped with knowledge of your product, and Hatchet tunes the process to suit you.
1) Discover Creators
The first step is finding creators who reach your target audience. Search 50M+ creators across 30+ platforms, filtering by what your partnership needs: Games played, social reach, language, even right down to more niche filters like what Twitch tags they use. Once you’ve got your list, skim down these creators: You can find out which demographics they appeal to, see their audience overlap with other creators, or even check out their stream and VOD history to see exactly what content they’re putting out.
2) Analyze Streaming & Socials Data
Once you’ve created a shortlist of creators, you can dive a bit deeper to better understand how they slot into the online landscape. For starters, you can make Groups of creators to quickly compare between them, allowing you to keep or cut creators as you see fit. But if you ask us, one of the best ways to dive beyond the numbers is to look at chat mentions: See what types of brands are being mentioned by these creators’ audiences, or how their fans react to different games they’re playing. By knowing who these creators are already appealing to, you can envision how your product would fit inside those conversations.
3) Build A Creator Community
Once you’ve got a grasp on the creators available to you and vetted the ones you’d like to partner with, it’s time to reach out. We cover building your Creator Community in full right here, but here’s a brief summary. Via Hatchet, you can bulk message the creators you want to join your community. You then manage every single connection via a single dedicated dashboard, so you can see who’s signed up and who is currently on an active campaign. You can also manage certain aspects of your campaigns from within Hatchet too, like distributing beta keys for your soon-to-be-released game or promo codes for your latest product (all performed via the Codes Management tool). Essentially, you’ve now got a standing army of brand spokespeople ready to push your latest release.
4) Report on Your Activations
With so many creators now singing your praises on various platforms, you need a simple way to find out how effective they are. Set up your reporting with keywords or creator labels so that we can auto-track every post, mention, and viewer from there. We then output this info into whatever format you’re most comfortable with: PDFs, spreadsheets, or even a custom Hatchet dashboard. And that goes for any kind of activation, including…
- Creator Marketing Reach
- League & Event Viewership
- Brand/Sponsorship Lift
- Competitive Analysis
If you don’t see the kind of reporting you need on any of our lists, then we will create a custom reporting solution for you. Say you’ve got some new creator-led tournament format that you’re trying to promote but it’s just not taking off. Our data team will research your past events, read the landscape, and provide suggestions on how to optimize your program. And that’s just one example: Seriously, try us, we’re eager to take on whatever challenges you’re facing!
And that whiteglove service goes for any of these four steps: If you’re ever unsure of how to take the next step, our customer solutions team is on hand to field your questions and guide you down the right path.
We’ve been so keen on hyping up creator marketing that we neglected to say one very important thing: Gaming is, and always will be, the heart of our company. Gamers are everywhere, and gaming culture is online culture. For 10 years we’ve explored how gaming communities connect online through live streaming, esports, and VOD content. But, moving forward, we’re also acknowledging that gaming creators have a diverse array of interests. Hatchet’s expanded scope of socials and streaming data, combined with our new creator-focused philosophy, more fairly represents just how influential gamers and other content creators are.
That’s where Hatchet’s future lies: Better understanding creators’ impact so we can consistently provide the most strategic advice to marketers. And, frankly, reactive discovery alone isn’t enough anymore: Brands and publishers need an extension of their team, one that is continuously learning from performance patterns, surfacing opportunities, and tuning itself to their needs. Hatchet is our vision for a BI that acts as a true strategic partner, and we’re excited to buddy up with you in the years to come.
Want to play around and see what we’re talking about for yourself? You can book a demo right now and search through 50M+ creators to start building your own community:
Or, to keep up to date with the creator marketing landscape across streaming and socials, follow Hatchet and receive exclusive newsletter-only content: