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Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

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Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#201

Post by busterarm »

com2kid wrote: post #188
busterarm wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't really compare extreme outliers against the norm. Very few Twitch streamers can have that kind of community you're talking about. I would wager low double digits.

> I would wager low double digits. I know of more than half a dozen who are just Super Mario Maker streamers. I know, my pure happenstance, of two cooking streamers who have built communities. I think low double digits is a low ball estimate. There are more successful retro gaming streamers than that, I have no idea what the contemporary game twitch scene is like. No one ever talks about 300 viewer streamers, they ma…

Few (if any) of those streamers are making a living wage off of just their few hours/week streaming.

It may be part of their income but not all of their income.

If you run the numbers on what's needed to make ~$1500/wk off of 4 hours/week of streaming, it doesn't paint the picture that you are.

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#202

Post by Cofike »

metalliqaz wrote: post #14

What I don't understand about Twitch is how anyone has time to consume this content. When it comes to sitting on your butt and watching something, the traditional TV show is moving to an on-demand model. Twitch is a step in the other direction, where if you faithfully consume content from any Twitch channel, you have to sit down and watch for hours every night when the streamer is online. Who does that? I imagine it'…

I love having it on when I'm just hanging out at night. I like the background noise, almost kind of like radio I can pay attention to if I feel like it.

There are people who will sit down and watch full broadcasts and in that case it can be a lot of time.

A lot of streamers are just always on which I'm sure makes it easier.

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#203

Post by swaggyBoatswain »

metalliqaz wrote: post #14

What I don't understand about Twitch is how anyone has time to consume this content. When it comes to sitting on your butt and watching something, the traditional TV show is moving to an on-demand model. Twitch is a step in the other direction, where if you faithfully consume content from any Twitch channel, you have to sit down and watch for hours every night when the streamer is online. Who does that? I imagine it'…

It depends who you ask

I don't play as much video games as much anymore but I had 5000 loyal followers that would take my word as the gospel. I had some offers on a dozen gaming networks, the biggest one was TGN. I would categorize twitch followers based on age demographic, since this is most of the behavioral trends I noticed

Young millenials have nothing to better to do sometimes and really enjoy having that "virtual friend" / "virtual older sibling" mentality when it comes to video games. It fills a void they have and its easily accessible, all they need is their phone and internet. No need to schedule things with your buddies who might not be in the mood to game. Example, pewdiepie's viewers are on the younger demographic end

General agnostic age categories - I would divide into four areas regardless of age.

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- One (like me) who still likes gaming and wants to keep up with some games mostly out of curiosity / bc I don't have time, so I watch gameplay videos mostly on youtube. I skip ahead sometimes and only watch videos here and there, sometimes at 2x speed.

- Two, people who have nothing better to do and enjoy watching streamers as a form of entertainment. Sometimes I would fit in this category as well, I watch a few fortnite players (nickeh30) who just have a great personality and are able to pull complex movements that only maybe 0.1% of players could do.

- Third, people looking to get better at the game by watching streamers. I sometimes fit in above category

- Fourth, we also have the esports area. This is your diehard sports-level fandom and I used to be a huge fan of DoTA partially because I played it for 10+ years and played with some of the top players competing today. It was nostalgia for me if anything, much like people who loved soccer growing up watched the world cup

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So there you go, that's how I categorize gamers on twitch. You also have kappa trolls among other things and also softcore porn tailored towards parental controlled networks for kids nearing puberty but that's a totally different story. Then you also have programming streams, we get a largely mostly older / smarter tech audience for that.

Twitch does have an API as well if you want to do data analytics on it

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#205

Post by hamandcheese »

metalliqaz wrote: post #14

What I don't understand about Twitch is how anyone has time to consume this content. When it comes to sitting on your butt and watching something, the traditional TV show is moving to an on-demand model. Twitch is a step in the other direction, where if you faithfully consume content from any Twitch channel, you have to sit down and watch for hours every night when the streamer is online. Who does that? I imagine it'…

I think you’re missing the entire, huge segment of young non-student non-professionals.

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#206

Post by leviathant »

xfs wrote: post #114
leviathant wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Speaking as someone who ran a rather large fansite about NIN in the 2000s (the entity now basically exists as a Twitter account), you really cannot just "grow organically" on today's internet. I like to tell people I have a marketing allergy. Self-promotion feels gross. The "if you build it, they will come" mantra from Field of Dreams is not applicable to a world where so much more content is being created than…

The question is what can we do about it? Are we stuck in the game of attention engineering forever?

There's no silver bullet, but I think you just have to pick a scope of specialization. I'll see if I can analogize it to my day job: I work for an ecommerce platform with built-in search, CMS, and business insights. That doesn't sound like specialization compared to, say, Shopify, but often times the companies that fit well for us are ecommerce companies that find they're spending too much effort being an IT shop, instead of focusing on marketing, merchandising, and branding. You can absolutely have a go at building a homegrown ecommerce platform that suits your needs, but are you thinking about maintaining that effort in-house five years down the road?

My wife's a composer, and between the work the two of us have put in around her music, she's gotten pretty good exposure - a piece of hers went fairly viral in 2009, with peak exposure probably being a couple of segments on the Rachel Maddow Show (and a lot of law blogs leading up to that). I built a custom CMS for showcasing the music she writes, and we take advantage of social media... but we've also seen friends of hers, also composers, short-circuit that by hiring a PR firm, and suddenly they're being reviewed in the New York Times. Throwing that cash around is way more efficient than, say, marrying a web developer and dabbling in media creation alongside maintaining a career in music composition.

On a larger scale, Trent Reznor/Nine Inch Nails has been through a couple of cycles of this. Started out on an indie label (1988), found it wasn't serving them well, basically struck out on their own to earn enough credibility that a big label bought out the contracts (1991), which worked well until it didn't (2000), went almost entirely in-house (2008), which did okay but didn't scale, and post-2010, works with different people or agencies with different strengths, between selling merch, manufacturing & distribution, tour management, publicity, and so forth.

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#207

Post by Twisol »

moretai wrote: post #175
Twisol wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can only speak for myself, but as someone who streams off and on (mostly off, since I've got other things going on right now that I need to focus on), I have no particular desire to be famous. I'd rather not be famous. But it's really enjoyable to be able to share my experiences with other people. For a lot of games (most?), there's a significant amount of organic content that comes out of you, a specific person, g…

It was a genuine question. I understand where you are coming from. But I wonder how far you have rationalized away from the point that it is you that are the source of the fun, and the other people are in for the ride. Your ride. You are not playing with these people. These people are watching YOU.

I think I made that point clear in my comment. As I said, it's a very different experience from playing with friends.

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#208

Post by bredren »

fastball wrote: post #137
mlinsey wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I watch Twitch because I grew up playing lots of video games and now watching is less of a time commitment then playing the games. Streamers aren't meant to be consumed by watching them every day for hours on end. I mean, I'm sure there are core fans who do that, probably students and single young professionals like you say, but my use case for Twitch is "hey, I have 10-20 minutes free; not even enough time for a ful…

Relevant HN post from yesterday[0]. I'm sure the same is true for eSports (if not more so!) 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17535995

I thought of eSports / streaming when I read that discussion yesterday.
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