Hot Words Widget: Turn Chat Into a Live Word Battle

What Is the Hot Words Widget?

The Hot Words widget is a live OBS overlay that shows the most frequently used words in your live chat. It displays as a ranked leaderboard that updates every 15 seconds, showing viewers exactly which words are dominating the conversation.

Think of it as a real-time word cloud, but presented as a clean, readable list that looks great on your stream. When viewers see their favourite word climbing the ranks, they start chatting more to push it higher. It turns passive chat into an interactive game.

Why It Works for Engagement

Chat engagement is the single biggest factor in growing your eBay Live audience. The more your viewers chat, the more eBay promotes your stream. Hot Words taps into a simple psychological trigger: competition.

When viewers see the word "chest" at number one with 42 mentions and "shoes" at number two with 38, they instinctively want to push their favourite word to the top. This creates organic chat activity without you having to constantly prompt people to type.

Streamers who use Hot Words consistently report higher chat volumes. More chat means more points for viewers, more engagement for the algorithm, and a more lively atmosphere for everyone watching.

How to Set It Up

1. Go to your Widgets page in your Seller Widgets dashboard.
2. Find Hot Words in the widget list and copy the browser source URL.
3. In OBS, add a new Browser Source and paste the URL.
4. Set the size to around 280 by 300 pixels. It works well in a corner of your stream layout.

The widget automatically connects to your live chat data and starts displaying word frequencies as soon as you go live. No configuration is needed beyond adding the browser source.

Customisation Options

Like all Seller Widgets overlays, Hot Words supports URL parameters for styling:

• count — Number of words to display (default 8, max 20).
• minutes — Lookback window in minutes (default 10, max 60). A shorter window shows what is trending right now. A longer window shows the overall conversation theme.
• color — Accent colour for the rank numbers and heading.
• text — Text colour for the word labels and counts.
• bg — Background colour. Leave blank for transparent, which works best for OBS overlays.

Tips for Maximising Impact

• Run word challenges — Tell viewers to spam a word if they want a discount or a special shoutout. Watch the leaderboard explode.
• Use it for product votes — Ask viewers to type the name of the item they want you to list next. The most popular word wins.
• Highlight it on camera — Point at the widget on your stream and comment on what is trending. This draws attention and encourages more participation.
• Pair it with the leaderboard — While Hot Words tracks popular words, the leaderboard tracks top chatters by points. Together they give viewers two reasons to keep chatting.

Smart Filtering

The Hot Words widget automatically filters out common stop words like "the", "is", "and" and other filler words that would otherwise dominate the list. It also ignores very short words (under 2 characters). This means the leaderboard shows genuinely interesting words that reflect what your audience is actually talking about.

Get Started

Hot Words is available on all Seller Widgets plans. Add it to your OBS layout today and watch your chat light up. It takes less than two minutes to set up and it makes an immediate difference to the energy of your streams.