In this blog, I’m going to be writing about Twitch & my time on the platform. If you’d like to check out my channel, you can do so here.
I’ve streamed fairly regularly on the platform for the past two or so years & I’m mostly retired from streaming now.
Being an introvert, it’s difficult trying to entertain people for the duration of your streams (often times multiple hours) & when there’s a lack of money involved, it quickly erases your motivation. It’s like that saying “your time is money.”
Having said that, I’ll probably still do an occasional stream every now & then.
I’ll probably crush some streamers dreams in this blog.
For those of you that don’t know what Twitch is, it’s a live streaming service for video games/gaming, podcasts, “in real life” streams, etc. it’s basically a smaller version of YouTube, except it emphasizes on the live streams. Twitch is operated by Twitch Interactive, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc. Twitch launched on June 6th, 2011.
Once you reach Affiliate status on Twitch, you start making money through subscriptions, bits, ad revenue, etc.
The reason I say I’ll probably crush people’s dreams is because I feel what happens is people set a lot of unrealistic expectations for where they may be able to go with this. It saddens me because these are people who are intelligent & could be doing anything else of value than wasting their time on something that is actually no fault of their own.
To be clear, it’s not that the vast majority of people will fail because of a lack of their own merit. It’s that you can start a stream on Twitch & you can do everything right & you can’t succeed because of the way the ecosystem is setup.
Twitch is your hobby, not your future.
Streaming can be an incredible dream with some really good money involved, but 99.9% of people who stream on any platform will never consistently make enough money to pay for a month of rent, let alone other expenses.
I feel like a lot of people that are trying to create a career on Twitch are absolutely utterly delusional. Don’t take it personal, people, I used to be delusional when I started out on Twitch.
Twitch is not built from the ground up to support a career as a content creator. Every other social media platform in existence is this & I think we get it confused. Twitch doesn’t do anything for your discovery. There is a “recommended” tab, which kind of works, but doesn’t really work for small broadcasters & I don’t think it ever will just because of the way saturation works on Twitch. It is not a platform that helps you discover.
Twitch doesn’t really have an incentive to make you (small streamers) discoverable to new viewers.
Twitch wants to put you in front of a large streamer because that’s the highest likelihood that you’re going to stay on their website, that you’re going to contribute to their ad revenue, you’re going to contribute to being on their website longer.
I think the mentality that people have of making Twitch a career, this mentality I feel like is very toxic. There is a lot of people with very broken expectations. My point is: thinking you’ll make it a career isn’t very realistic.
This post isn’t about making people think they can’t succeed or I don’t want you to win, because I do, I want everyone to win. But the first thing you have to do is get realistic with your expectations & realistic about what is possible.
To avoid misunderstanding on this….My context = people that want to make streaming at least a side-gig, with best case scenario making it a career. If you’re one of those people that have been trying this for a year or two (or longer), but see no real growth, then I think it’s time to re-evaluate things. I completely agree that you can stream as a hobby & for fun. I also completely agree that you can balance it with your real life. I’m not saying streaming is mutually exclusive to part-time/full-time career income or get lost.
What I’m trying to tell you is this: The world is much bigger than Twitch. Odds are you’re getting a terrible return on investment from Twitch. You’re worth more than what Twitch dictates.
It was a good run on Twitch.
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