My Live-Streaming Career

Welcome back to my blog, today I’m airing the anticipated post talking about my streaming career that I mentioned in my last entry, I think livestreaming and being a content creator online in this day and age is one profession that almost every teen has tried or at least dreamt about, it seems to be the new “when I grow up I want to be an astronaut”  that everyone gives up on as soon as they try it, but so far in my career I think I went above and beyond that shallow desire to be a youtuber just because of the fame and the appeal of playing videogames for money, in fact the reason as to why I’ve waited so long for this post was because I wanted to have something to show as evidence of the quality of my channel, and now I’ve finally got it, so here’s the post.

So, the platform which I use for livestreaming is Twitch.tv, this is the biggest platform to date and it is owned by amazon, as Twitch is the biggest platform it naturally has the most streamers actively streaming their content, and all of this traffic costs a lot to host in Twitch’s servers, so they created a system to distinguish the most-successful streamers from the smaller ones so that they could sort out which users get what features, as the features cost money. This system put in place three categories of streamers, the first category doesn’t have a name, but it consists of the streamers which are too small for Twitch to affiliate them, they don’t really get any perks and cannot even monetize their hobby. The second category are the affiliate streamers, in this tier you get to start earning money with Twitch, your viewers can support you through donations and subscriptions, you get your own emotes, and many other perks which are way too specific for me to explain in a post which is about my personal experience rather than how the platform works, at this point you are affiliated with amazon and you have to sign a contract for content exclusivity, meaning that you can only stream on Twitch for as long as the contract lasts, less than 10% of the users on Twitch are affiliated. The last tier is being a partnered streamer, at this point you get many other perks and you get a personalized contract with Twitch, note that less than 1% of users are partnered, so if you are, it means that you are a big deal.

The reason as to why I explained all of this is that the thing that I was talking about before when I said that I finally had something to show for all my efforts put into this hobby is that I finally got affiliated with Twitch! It took me a long way to get here (8 months of on and off streaming if we want to get specific) and I cannot be happier about it (which is weird given that I am celebrating working for amazon for basically free), it has been a lot of effort and I want to break some of it down, so let’s start with the design, here is a short video showing off my setup for the channel.

I like to think that I am talented in some fields of life, however, art is not one of them, so when it came to creating art to represent my brand, I had to get some help. One day I decided to publish a tweet looking for artists who could turn my ideas into sprites that I would later use in OBS (The software I use for streaming) after an exhausting array of messages with tens of commission artists I finally found someone who’s style I liked for my stream, so we got to work, my idea for the stream was a medieval-like overlay, some fun trivia about me: everything medieval is very appealing to me, so I wanted to base my stream on that, however the medieval aesthetic can feel very dark and unwelcoming to most people, so we had to fix that in some way. I must admit that my request wasn’t easy, but I’d like to give massive props to Gabrilot (The artist) because as you saw in the video it turned out great. Some more details about the art that I want to point out are my profile pic, the panels that pop-up when you click “about” on my channel, and the squiggly name which I have on top of my webcam in some scenes.

The profile picture that I have for all my socials related to streaming is custom and I love it, it is based on my Minecraft character, a Minecraft pig wearing the berserker armor from my favorite manga: berserk, the pig comes from me wearing a pig skin when I started playing Minecraft in 2013 for the very first time (I thought they were cool), and the armor because I think it’s badass and the manga touched me. In order to get the picture done I made a reddit post on a challenge subreddit were I said I would give whoever made me the best profile picture with those qualities a certain amount of reddit gold which I don’t remember right now (I didn’t have money at the time so it was the best I could offer). The squiggly name I actually made myself in a fight with Adobe After Effects over a long night, I saw a fellow streamer have something similar so I decided to try to recreate it for my stream as if I ever got a clip from my stream to go viral, they would know who I am. The panels were Gabrilot’s courtesy, but I really like them, and I think it is a very practical way to introduce my audience with the rest of my social media and have the stream be more engaging, each panel has a link which will take you to the page it is talking about. I think the whole combination of factors makes for a very original and recognizable aesthetic for my stream which I’d say has played its part in my ongoing growth and which I’d also argue gives the unappealing stock purple flashy overlays 80% of Twitch uses a run for their money.

The next thing that I want to talk about is my number one method of growth on Twitch: Networking and collaborating. If there is an absolute truth about Twitch is that it is easily the platform with the worse discoverability, there are millions of streamers live at a time on Twitch, and unlike other platforms such as YouTube, Twitch does not have an algorithm in place to recommend you channels, push small streamers to new audiences, or really to show your stream to anybody at all. When you stream on Twitch for the very first time the only way for somebody to find you would be: clicking on the category of your stream, and scrolling down the hundreds of thousands of people playing with more viewers than you (which will be everybody as you have just started), and clicking on your stream, or, searching your exact username on the search bar and clicking it, which might as well be impossible. This system is really bad as many people with great content get stuck with one concurrent viewer even if they had great content, you could host a ten-million-dollar gameshow on Twitch and nobody would ever know, so streamers have to resort to other ways of growing. My first instinct was TikTok, the platform is huge and you could go viral easily so I’ve been posting some tiktoks, and while I have accumulated a couple thousand views I have not had a breakthrough yet, so while I’m still trying to post tiktoks I decided that I couldn’t rely on that for growth, so the next thing I tried was collaborating, and that’s when the viewership got really good. It is a common practice for streamers of the same size to collaborate as hopefully they can drag some viewers from each other’s community to their own streams, I have joint some streamer discords and subreddits which have been working alright, but the best way that I found to do this is by literally scrolling down categories until I found people with similar a viewership to me and asking to get in a call with them promising good content, basically (without me being live) I would get in their calls, crack some jokes, and give them something to do in their streams, later I would message them and plan a stream in which both of us would be live so their followers could start following me, the reason as to why this worked is because us streamers are in a constant state of starvation for some good content for our streams, so I would first prove to be a good source of fun for the streams without me gaining anything, and later I would offer even more content in a collaboration, he benefitted by having fun content on stream and I benefitted for getting a bunch of new followers. A good example for this is the first time I tied this strategy with the streamer GalaxyLycanGio, I found him with 20 live viewers, which is way more than I had at the time, I got in a call with him and his friend and we played Minecraft together, they liked me so I told them that we should add each other on Discord and shortly after that I offered him and his friend to do a competition live on a website called Human Benchmark, the website test your reflexes, memory, and speed in different ways, so we did it for a while to test who was better (he won), after we finished we played Minecraft for a while and it ended up being my best-performing stream ever with 7 average viewers over the span of two and a half hours where before I averaged 2 viewers. I want to point out that this was terribly hard for me, I am a very introverted guy, so the idea of suddenly getting in calls with strangers in front of audiences that I’ve never had before was very scary, of course it was awkward at first, but I’ve gotten way better, and I am proud of myself for doing that.

That’s basically all of it, my career so far, it is a hyper simplified post, but if the stuff that I haven’t said was all that interesting I’d be a bigger streamer already, the good news is that with everything that I’ve unlocked as an affiliate I am just getting started and I am super excited for everything, I’ve got a new artist who I am designing my channel emotes with and many plans for more content, it has been a great experience so far that has taught me a lot about networking, working with artist, showmanship, and much more, and I am ecstatic for whatever’s next!