Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

WoW streamer hires YouTubers who leeched off his stream to run official channel

kotaku.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 88 posts

Re: WoW streamer hires YouTubers who leeched off his stream to run official channel

#21

Post by bradenb »

Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #18
flafla2 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don’t watch live streamers for the game, they watch them for the streamer. On the contrary, 90% of the value of the stream comes from the personality playing the game and 10% comes from the game itself. It is common for streamers to jump around many games because it was never about which game was being played. A good example of this is DayZ, a game that was very buggy and had a lot of negative criticism, and y…

If that was true, they would be doing it without games - they would just be sitting there and chatting for example. But since they don't, it mostly means that for those streamers people would not have watched them without the game being played, so the question of whether the game or streamer is at 90% of value it quite open.

No. The games are just the common ground between the streamer and the audience. Remove the common ground and it's not as much fun. Sure, the streamer's personality might be sufficient for a video by itself, but I suspect both sides want the game there to serve as a vehicle for progressing the social interaction.

Re: WoW streamer hires YouTubers who leeched off his stream to run official channel

#22

Post by dageshi »

Hamuko wrote: post #10
Qahlel wrote: post #2

Technically, that's how I had found about Asmongold in the first place. The real money -for streamers- is in Twitch. What he's doing, is logical and smart for his bottom-line.

Yeah, I found about Asmongold on YouTube as well. Watched some clips, amusing stuff. But where that failed was that I didn't go on Twitch to watch his streams. I think an important question is what's the conversion rate from YouTube to Twitch. And what kind of an incentive is there for people to go on Twitch if the "best bits" go on YouTube anyways?

I think there's an entire section of the audience that don't like livestreaming but do like watching highlights of cool stuff in youtube. I don't watch twitch, but I know who Doctor Disrespect and Shroud are because I've seen their compilation vids on youtube. At a certain point just general recognition of who and what you are is worth something even if you can't directly monetise it.

Re: WoW streamer hires YouTubers who leeched off his stream to run official channel

#23

Post by sushibowl »

Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #18
flafla2 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don’t watch live streamers for the game, they watch them for the streamer. On the contrary, 90% of the value of the stream comes from the personality playing the game and 10% comes from the game itself. It is common for streamers to jump around many games because it was never about which game was being played. A good example of this is DayZ, a game that was very buggy and had a lot of negative criticism, and y…

If that was true, they would be doing it without games - they would just be sitting there and chatting for example. But since they don't, it mostly means that for those streamers people would not have watched them without the game being played, so the question of whether the game or streamer is at 90% of value it quite open.

> If that was true, they would be doing it without games - they would just be sitting there and chatting for example.

This argument is flawed because 1) many streamers do exactly that, and 2) just because a streamer is not interesting when he's not playing a game doesn't mean that all the value is coming from the game. A juggler is not interesting without balls, does that mean it's the balls providing 90% of the value?

Given that:

* many streamers spend a substantial amount of their time just sitting and chatting with viewers, no game being played.

* if it was the game providing the value, you could just show a recorded playthrough without a streamer there to interact with the viewers, but this is not very popular.

* many streamers can play any game at all and draw a large viewership, but there are no games that any person can just start streaming and easily draw a large viewership

It seems fairly clear to me that the streamer contributes much more value to a livestream than the game being played.

Re: WoW streamer hires YouTubers who leeched off his stream to run official channel

#24

Post by zanny »

skrebbel wrote: post #12

Note: I don't know anything about games or livestreaming. This is a genuine question about something that confuses me. Can someone explain why livestreamers can claim their stream as their own original content, but reuploaders can't? I mean, someone who livestreams a game is primarily showing off the artwork and level design and everything put in by the game company. There's like 90% derived content plus 10% original…

Its in the same camp as fanart - as long as you don't fall under the ire of the original IP owner you are generally ignored. Nintendo, in contrast, is pretty infamous for claiming monetization on Youtube lets plays of their games and getting some taken down over the years. But they also regularly go after fan works across all mediums.

They do have that right - it is footage of their IP - and any game developer could sue for copyright infringement of anyone distributing recordings of their work. Its just rarely in their self interest to do so - Youtubers don't have the money to justify the legal battle (and those that do can then also afford the lawyers to protract out the contention in the courts about it despite ultimately the law being on the game publishers side) and lets plays generate free advertising for their games. How many units do you think sell when Pewdiepie plays your game? Probably way more than he makes in ad revenue off the video showcasing it. Its why developers go so far as to sponsor these kinds of videos outright - with a popular channel and a game that matches the demographic audience of the lets player you can easily way better returns paying for sponsored lets plays than using traditional advertising.

Re: WoW streamer hires YouTubers who leeched off his stream to run official channel

#25

Post by eru »

andreareina wrote: post #14
skrebbel wrote: post #12

Note: I don't know anything about games or livestreaming. This is a genuine question about something that confuses me. Can someone explain why livestreamers can claim their stream as their own original content, but reuploaders can't? I mean, someone who livestreams a game is primarily showing off the artwork and level design and everything put in by the game company. There's like 90% derived content plus 10% original…

The general rule for derivative works is that you own the changes, but you still need the original copyright holder's permission to distribute the changed version. Thus the reuploader owns the sequence of play(stream, start, end) instructions that make up the edited version, but the streamer still owns the stream itself. So the publishers own the game, the streamer owns the performance, and the reuploader owns the ed…

And in most cases these days the games company gives (at least implicit) approval.

Re: WoW streamer hires YouTubers who leeched off his stream to run official channel

#26

Post by cletus »

I'm honestly surprised at how bad Youtube is at policing reuploaded content. Compare this to, say, music rights enforcement, where a car with a loud stereo passing you in the street can cause your video to be demonetized or taken down for rights violations.

This goes beyond reuploading. There are a ton of videos that use some clickbait-y title, the likeness of a creator and have inaccurate titles about what they contain. They then have 30-90 seconds of a clips from the creator followed by nonsensical filler to get it to the magical 10 minute duration. I'm not sure the significance of 10 minutes but there clearly is one. Better monetization? Another ad break?

And the onus of policing this is put entirely on the creator.

Honestly these regurgitation channels should be incredibly easy to detect and demonetize (if not take down entirely). They're bad for the ecosystem and just give pages of garbage results when you search for anything.

Now some people are actually good at taking long content and cutting it up into bite sized pieces. Good for them and it's smart of Asmongold to leverage them. The onus just shouldn't be on the creator to police this.

Re: WoW streamer hires YouTubers who leeched off his stream to run official channel

#27

Post by cameronbrown »

cletus wrote: post #26

I'm honestly surprised at how bad Youtube is at policing reuploaded content. Compare this to, say, music rights enforcement, where a car with a loud stereo passing you in the street can cause your video to be demonetized or taken down for rights violations. This goes beyond reuploading. There are a ton of videos that use some clickbait-y title, the likeness of a creator and have inaccurate titles about what they cont…

The ten minute mark is to get an ad when the video ends.

Re: WoW streamer hires YouTubers who leeched off his stream to run official channel

#28

Post by time0ut »

Hamuko wrote: post #10
Qahlel wrote: post #2

Technically, that's how I had found about Asmongold in the first place. The real money -for streamers- is in Twitch. What he's doing, is logical and smart for his bottom-line.

Yeah, I found about Asmongold on YouTube as well. Watched some clips, amusing stuff. But where that failed was that I didn't go on Twitch to watch his streams. I think an important question is what's the conversion rate from YouTube to Twitch. And what kind of an incentive is there for people to go on Twitch if the "best bits" go on YouTube anyways?

I also found Asmongold this way and did catch a couple of his streams. The big draw on twitch is community/participation. That's not my thing so I didn't stick around. I'd be interested to know conversion rates, but I have no doubt there are enough people who go from discovery via YouTube to Twitch subscriber that it makes it worth it.

Re: WoW streamer hires YouTubers who leeched off his stream to run official channel

#29

Post by Sekhmet »

cletus wrote: post #26

I'm honestly surprised at how bad Youtube is at policing reuploaded content. Compare this to, say, music rights enforcement, where a car with a loud stereo passing you in the street can cause your video to be demonetized or taken down for rights violations. This goes beyond reuploading. There are a ton of videos that use some clickbait-y title, the likeness of a creator and have inaccurate titles about what they cont…

When your video is longer than 10 minutes you can place ads manually wherever you want and increase the total number of ads in the video.

Re: WoW streamer hires YouTubers who leeched off his stream to run official channel

#30

Post by fuu_dev »

flafla2 wrote: post #13
skrebbel wrote: post #12

Note: I don't know anything about games or livestreaming. This is a genuine question about something that confuses me. Can someone explain why livestreamers can claim their stream as their own original content, but reuploaders can't? I mean, someone who livestreams a game is primarily showing off the artwork and level design and everything put in by the game company. There's like 90% derived content plus 10% original…

People don’t watch live streamers for the game, they watch them for the streamer. On the contrary, 90% of the value of the stream comes from the personality playing the game and 10% comes from the game itself. It is common for streamers to jump around many games because it was never about which game was being played. A good example of this is DayZ, a game that was very buggy and had a lot of negative criticism, and y…

There are hundreds of examples for popular streamers that tried to change games but needed to go back to keep their viewer base what makes the statement that its 90% the streamer not sustainable.

This does not make your statement wrong, but there are several other dependencies that do not allow this to be generalized.

Post reply on HN