Twitch.tv, owned by Amazon, has been the main gaming livestream platform in North America since 2011. It has over 3 million broadcasters monthly with over 100 millions viewers per month. Based on my own data, 97.5% of broadcasters stream to less than 10 viewers. I streamed for the past 8 years to an average viewership of 5-10. When I was at my peak concurrent viewership on Twitch, I was top 2.65% of all streamers. In some ways this was validating. People chose to watch my streamer over the majority of other streams out there… In reality, I was spending between 60-100 hours a month dedicating my life to entertaining 10 people for less than 100$ a month. The main problems with Twitch faced by small streamers on this platform are discoverability, 50% revenue split, forced ads and psychological impact.
Data from https://twitchtracker.com/lilboofs
Visibility and Discovery
The main problems of the Twitch platform lies in visibility and discoverability. I’m bombarded with the most popular streams when I load the front page of Twitch. Ninja, TimtheTatMan, probably a bunch of categories you don’t even care about. For new users, they could just click on one of these already popular streams and watch. This allows the streamer to snowball their already huge audience. Finding creators you vibe with enough to watch regularly usually takes work and dedication. After 10 years using this platform it still doesn’t know what I enjoy watching. When I open Twitch I’m usually greeted with a pair of big boobs or a greasy ass. I’m shown League of Legends streams when I’m not even following the section. I haven’t watched League streams regularly since 2014.
I have spent so much time combing through Twitch to find streamers that I vibe with. The algorithm never helped me. All of my favourite streamers I found by browsing. I go to a section that I like, a category I streamed in, and scroll through it until I see someone interesting. Even still, I rarely found a stream that I liked enough to dedicate to watching on a regular basis. For categories with between 1000-2000 viewers it’s easy to scroll through the entire section trying to look for someone. But with larger categories, if you want to find a small streamer you have to sort by viewer count. The problem with this is there are so many broadcasting to 1 viewer. It becomes a massive chore to even find a channel with between 5-20 viewers.
Building and Maintaining a Community for a Livestream
The largest streams people watch are for either gameplay or drama/entertainment (reality show). Many viewers watch Twitch, especially small streamers, as a social outlet. For these people streams with between 10-20 viewers hit a sweet spot. It’s a low enough amount of people that the streamer will pay attention to you. A stream between 5-10 viewers struggles to foster a sense of community though. Getting even 5 people to watch your stream for a decent chunk of time to hold your concurrent viewers up is incredibly difficult, let alone them coming back being repeated viewers. Out of 1500 followers that I amassed over 8 years, about 150 of them are involved with what I do on a regular basis. Less would regularly watch a stream of mine. This isn’t to hate on people that don’t come to my streams. I am incredibly grateful that anyone, let alone 100 people, click on my stream everyday. I’m just giving perspective on how hard it is to gain and maintain an audience.
Monetization Challenges of Livestreaming
Despite the platform’s role hosting gaming careers and content creation, the path to viable income is loaded with obstacles. Central to this issue is the monetization structure which bottlenecks between streaming as a passion to a viable source of income. Twitch currently takes 50% of all sub and ad revenue. To even get there is a feat in itself; becoming a Twitch affiliate requires reaching an average viewership of 3 and 50 followers. What they effectively offer in return is a platform to stream on. That’s it. If you want to grow your channel you better have lots of friends IRL, another platform you’re already popular on, or be incredibly lucky. Most people will never make a cent from Twitch. Since I became disabled and unable to find meaningful work in my city it was a dream to make a sustainable living from streaming. The stark reality is that 99% of people will never make enough from Twitch to consider it a full time career.
Ads
The ads man, the fucking ads. There is no way to opt out of showing ads on your stream if you are an affiliate or a partner. The best you can do is game it in a way that pre-roll ads won’t play on your stream. The way to do this is to run a 1.5 minute ad every 30 minutes. However, this is not the default. If you get a raid from someone and your ads aren’t set “properly”, everyone from the raid is getting an ad and probably clicking off the stream. I’ve opened Twitch so many times to an ad, and immediately closed the app. It’s especially bad on mobile and VODs for some reason where I’m getting 5 minute ads every 15 minutes. I can’t get away from ads and I’m assaulted by them in nearly every aspect of life. I literally cannot enjoy Twitch streams with unskippable ads.
Psychological Impact of Livestreaming
It takes a lot of time and effort to grow and maintain an audience. The Grind is often brought up as the method when searching for resources to help your stream. This grind is never a ending cycle of trying to be consistent and constantly plugging your streams on any social media platform you use. It’s about carving your niche and building your brand. But it seems the only ones becoming successful off of the grind is the people putting out the how-to videos for dejected streamers to watch. I’m left wondering if I’m accomplishing anything. Paired with the struggle for visibility this often affects a streamer’s mental health. How many times has a small streamer you follow fallen off the face of Twitch? You never see them live again, or maybe pop up months later. A streamer can begin to substitute online social interactions for real life ones. Since Twitch can be such a social outlet, it can become hard to connect with people offline. Especially if they don’t understand streamer culture, friendships become strained. The pressure to continuously entertain with the discouragement of stagnant viewership numbers takes it’s toll.
Call to Action for Twitch
Twitch, owned by Amazon (the 5th largest company in the world), should have the resources to dedicate to making their site better for small streamers. This would require investments into making the algorithm more favorable to small streamers. Considering they make most of their money off of large streamers I don’t think this is a problem they will ever tackle. Another way to help small streamers would be more control over their ads. They should allow streamers to choose whether or not they want ads shown on their channel. Currently all affiliated and partner streams are forced to show ads. Another thing Twitch should do is offer a better monetization split; taking 50% of a content creators revenue is appalling.
To me, Twitch is just another giant platform that will stagnate with its giant creators. It has no room for the intimate charm that small streamers bring. I recommend people streaming on Twitch look to alternative platforms since Twitch no longer enforces exclusive content. Multi-streaming is now an option. If you want something truly built from the ground up by small streamers, join the growing roster of BOOFSWORLD.net. We continue to build our site with plans for people to stream easily on our platform as a Twitch alternative.
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