Comment by formalsystem
6 years ago
twitch is one of the platforms where I feel like I've struggled the most to get viewers. just playing my main game like Dota wasn't too productive since I'm not a pro or super hot so my value proposition there isn't too compelling. Instead I've been trying to focus more on streaming myself programming and learning new scientific or game programming libraries and have been enjoying it quite a bit. My viewer count is veeery slowly increasing but almost noone is subscribing, many of my friends have expressed interest in watching me so my plan is to start letting them know when I'm about to stream to seed some viewers. Also I've realized that the more specific your brand is on social media the more effective, I've been looking at branding myself as a strategy game buff/developer so will be streaming niche strategy games and Unity game development every weekend. I'll re-asses after a month to see if this plan was effective.
I really appreciate this project as going from 0-1 viewers on Twitch where the 1 isn't your friend is challenging.
It definitely takes a long view approach. A couple important aspects of building a steaming following are structure and consistency.
If you give people a clear idea of what to expect from your stream and when it will be live, and if you don't make too many drastic or sudden changes to either of those variables, then those who like your content enough to make time for it will do so.
If you keep making changes, show up late or just don't seem dedicated, then people won't feel like they can rely on you. Because of that, people won't factor you into their decisions about how they spend their time.
Glad to see you're giving it an effort! I wish you the best of luck.
In addition, the most well attended streamers also have a significant following and consistent upload schedule on YouTube. Since Twitch lacks any sort of discoverability algorithm, new streamers will always have very few to no viewers. Having content on YouTube that drives viewers to twitch is nigh a requirement to be successful on the platform.
Also +1 for the consistency. I try to stream every work day at the same time and it really helps -- I mean, I'm still a backwater coding stream, but usually at least at some part of my stream I have double digits watching. If I take a few days off, though, people wander away. I'm not actually concerned about viewership (I stream for other reasons), but the other thing I've noticed is that I tend to naturally get pockets of viewers in different time zones. If I were to try to grow the stream, I would actively try to cater to 1 or 2 time zones that were popular. So try streaming at different times occasionally to see where you get the best uptake and then adjust your schedule to make it easy for those people to watch.
This! Become part of people's routine.
That’s because discovery on Twitch is almost non-existent. If you want to grow your Twitch channel start on YouTube, advertise your twitch channel there, and slowly try to convert people.
Yeah. Generally the way to become established on Twitch (without relying on YouTube) is to become part of a pre-existing community as a viewer and subscriber yourself, and then to receive raids from established streamers in that community.
Most of my viewing experience is with retro game speedrunning and the specific advice for that community is to pick a game you want to learn and follow the best players. The world record holders and their friends tend to be very happy to share advice and tips for their game with new runners. This is great because it helps you establish a relationship with them without being “that guy” who is just there to try and promote his streaming channel (those people are universally reviled and often banned for unsolicited promotion). Instead, if you’re a legitimate member of the community, learning and improving at the game, then the big streamers may be happy to send you a raid.
It’s very much not a get rich quick scheme. It’s more like moving to a small town. You need to put yourself out there and ingratiate yourself to the community in order to gain trust and become a respected member. The above advice should be largely adaptable to any form of streaming with an established community.
This is great advice, contribute to various Discord and Slack communities and once you establish trust start plugging your stream and even have various people from the community as guests. I guess key is to give give give before you expect people to reward you with their attention.
the only route of discovery for twitch is r/livestreamfails
unless twitch gives users incentive to go down the streamer list twitch as a growth platform is doomed. streaming is niche, gaming is even more niche. a platform thats solely for streaming gamers is isolated, thats why they've been trying to push just chatting and other endeavors outside of gaming but inevitably the majority of the userbase is made of gamers (in the slur sense) and make it difficult for non-gamers to become invested.
Youtube and Facebook streaming dont have these issues bc theyre built on platforms meant for everyone
It's not an issue of discovery. There's just too much out there. No matter what algorithm you choose, you will leave out the vast majority of other streamers. And YouTube isn't any better. In fact, it's going through its own mini-drama with even established YouTubers seeing their subscription counts going down and blaming YouTube for it, when in reality, there are just too many people creating content.
It really is about discoverability, though.
On Youtube, everything is about producing enticing videos and if you do a great job, the algo will favor you even if you are a small channel. Youtube search plays an important part in all of this.
On Twitch, the unit of interest is the live stream and that is much more difficult to produce content around. It also makes finding interesting streams challenging because search doesn't work well with this type of content. Heck, you can't even query the directory for basic stuff like [show me streamers living in Sweden who usually stream GTA 5 RP].
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Also great advice, Youtube is better for well edited content and I have been teaching myself Da Vinci Resolve and have gotten a lot better at it over the past few weeks. Once that takes off, it may be easier to cross pollinate my Twitch channel.
I've found quite a few streamers I really enjoy this way. They always have people coming into the stream saying, "saw you on YouTube, thought I'd check out the stream."
Network; network, network. Get known outside your stream. Discord and twitter are very good platforms for that. There are several hashtags on twitter and multiple discord servers for content creators which are highly moderated. This blog and the OPs discord has helped me a lot: https://medium.com/@jomosenpai/a-growth-hackers-guide-to-gro... there is also the subreddit /r/twitch_startup... avoid /r/twitchstreams at all cost. No moderation there
Visibility. Dota and the likes have a large audience and are very easy to stream. Take a twist on it, or stream something else so you are easier to find.
Stream quality and viewer interaction. Talk to your chat and say their names as often as possible. In addition to that, have fancy overlays, a good cam and a good mic.
No, Discord is not a good platform for that - or for anything for that matter. Your data and metadata is more valuable than that.
Now, actual communities in something like Matrix? Totally agree, would be very useful and insightful.
>twitch is one of the platforms where I feel like I've struggled the most to get viewers.
That's expected though. It's also true of YouTubers, and Instagram 'influencers'. Because the barrier to entry is low, you're competing with hundreds of thousands of other streamers for the same set of eyeballs. Except for a tiny minority, the vast majority of you will never make a penny from streaming. Do it as a hobby, but don't expect to make a living off of it.
Yeah definitely not my expectation to make a living out of it, I'm just doing this for fun but streaming into a void isn't as fun as streaming to a handful of people at a time. On Twitter for e.g it's easy to get started with 0 followers since a few insightful replies to posts by popular people can bootstrap you. A popular streamer bootstrapping me on Twitch has a lot more friction and is a lot less likely to happen.
I'm working on https://www.0views.club exactely to try and mitigate this problem :) It's a case of sincronicity with GP, I'm literally working on it (that's why you'll see the TOP streams right now... I'm testing stuff out). Wanna try once ready? I want to give the user the possibility to set custom tags as well.
Yeah reach out whenever you like, my email should be in my profile
I think "1 friend" puts you ahead of more streamers than you'd think, if they're actually watching. They can at least give you feedback about what is and isn't entertaining
Have you considered the fact that, perhaps, watching someone else playing instead of playing ourself is boring? Or that if someone has skill to understand programming, he is way more likely to make his own program instead of watching someone else code on a project he doesn’t care about? Because besides discoverability and red ocean, that’s the most likely causes.
You might want to consider some up and coming platforms where the competition is less intense, for now. On our platform, Spoon, if you stream for an hour you will definitely get listeners (it's audio only though). I think that dynamic changes as the platform grows.
Yes, starting off with your friends just being in chat is very useful. Itll attract more people, and if you show that you have a good little community, then they will stay, bringing more people.
That's interesting! I would watch it
What's your Twitch name?
Thank you, I really appreciate that. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/606535356
I'm slowly getting better at it too and am planning on streaming some Julia Differential Equations stuff tomorrow PST.
How do you broadcast yourself coding? Is it terribly CPU (ie battery life) or network intensive?
It's pretty common, I do it (shameless plug https://www.twitch.tv/nickbusey)
My stream setup is open source on GitLab https://gitlab.com/NickBusey/CodingStream
Here's an article I used in my early days to help get going https://medium.com/@suzhinton/my-twitch-live-coding-setup-b2...
I realize it wasn’t yours, but that’s a really good write up! Thanks for sharing.
I’ve considered doing counting like this before but didn’t really know where to get started.
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Usually for streaming games you do need a relatively beefy CPU to stream and get good framerates in game, because running the game and capturing/encoding video at the same time is expensive. I imagine streaming a mostly static text editor/IDE would be much less of a load on the CPU though.
It is very CPU intensive but nowadays CPUs with high core counts are very cheap. Get an AMD CPU with at least 6 cores and you will be doing fine.
I have a Desktop PC that I've built, AMA if you want to get started. I have a 32 core Ryzen CPU so I'm really well equipped.
Most the big streamers got to where they are by view botting, the "fake it til you make it" approach.
I'm not recommending that, it's something that Twitch are hotter about catching and banning these days, but it has meant that there has been an entrenched set of "big streamers" for some time now with less ability to break in.
Really the only way is to be playing a game for a while that suddenly gets big so you can be one of the better players for a while, or be playing a niche game that a 'big streamer' happens to play and you'll pick up some viewers when they inevitably move on to the next thing.
> Most the big streamers got to where they are by view botting, the "fake it til you make it" approach.
I'm sorry but this is not true. There have however been perception issues around viewbotting. One such:
For most of the life of host mode when a small stream would get hosted by a big stream, nearly all of the transitioned viewers would stay (through inaction) in the host's channel. Many would be AFK. The small streamer ends up with a large viewercount but a disproportionally "dead" chat, leading to cries of viewbotting.
Coincidentally, big-to-small hosts like this are frequently how fantastic but relatively undiscovered streamers get their "big break", further entangling the accusations with their success.
Source: Worked for five years at Twitch, built host mode
(PS: As someone who became good friends with some of these "big streamers" and those at Twitch combatting viewbotting, I can't help but feel insulted on both their behalves that the amount of invisible effort they pour into their craft so frequently gets shat on.)
> > Most the big streamers got to where they are by view botting, the "fake it til you make it" approach.
> I'm sorry but this is not true.
How can you possibly claim you know that most big streamers never used bots or bought views? None of them would ever tell a Twitch employee if they did. If you had the capacity to detect all bots then there would be zero botting on the platform, which is certainly not the case.
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Sounds like from your description host mode is essentially Twitch driven viewbotting.
I hear you, I'm sure some streamers got to where they are with sketchy policies but for the most part the streamers I follow are either Dota 2 pros that have spent years of their life getting good at the game and also stream very consistently (almost everyday) while still being entertaining for 3-5 hours at a time, they also have dedicated editors which will do shorter clips with the occasional meme on youtube if you weren't able to catch the stream live.
For programming related streams I follow Jonathan Blow because he has a unique viewpoint around programming and also because I trust him because he's shipped multiple succesful games.
Be succesful IRL seems to be one of the best ways to get a popular stream.