Comment by heed
6 years ago
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.
6 years ago
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].
Discoverability matters much less than you think because discoverability is a zero-sum game. If the algorithm favours one type of creator, it necessarily means that it takes 'it' away from another - so the more creators you pile on, the harder it is for any one of them to breakthrough - regardless of how awesome your discoverability algorithm is.
There are some caveats. If the audience is growing relative to the number of creators, you (on average) still have a chance. YouTube also has a huge audience and wide variety of content (much more than Twitch, which is heavily focused on video-game streaming), so it's possible that there are some niches that can still be exploited in a way that you couldn't on Twitch, which is heavily focused on a small number of niches.
None of that takes away from the larger point - it's a race to the bottom when trying to be a viable creator, and the probability of building a big-enough audience to make enough money to even partially support yourself is very very low.
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."