This article isn’t about the tech, or the social media strategies exactly. Instead, this is some things that I’ve learned about “being” a “streamer” that I find important. The next article will include techy tips and tricks, like what audio filters you need to focus on learning (spoiler: they’re the limiter, noise suppression, and noise gate filters), so stay tuned for that!
Streaming is a Performance
It’s easy to watch some of the big streamers or YouTubers, and think that need to create a “character” to stream as, while some streamers will tell you that you should “just be you”. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle – if you don’t want to create a whole persona, you can just be you, but you need to present a version of you that’s performance ready.
What does “performance ready” mean, though? Say you’re shy, or quiet and not especially talkative. That’s not likely to be entertaining for most people. There’s absolutely a place for quiet, chill streamers, and quiet streams, but most viewers want to be able to talk and interact with the streamer. Being more outgoing, and “switched on” isn’t being someone else, but it is a performance.
A performed version of you might instead just be a filtered, more consistent version of you – along the lines of a “phone voice” that customer service workers adopt. Someone less affected by the goings on of the world, who is there to give a consistent vibe every stream. A performed version of you might lean into specific quirks of your personality, like playing up how much you dislike a certain tutorial character, or dialling the chaos meter up.
A streaming performance might instead entail solid, high level gaming. Speedrunners practise for untold hours before bringing a run to their stream, because the performance for them is showcasing expert plays or complex tricks and glitches.
While streaming might start as “just hanging out”, it usually progresses to being a performance if you stick with it. You are the focal point, you’re practically on a stage, and you’re the entertainment of the hour (or six).
Chat is the Best and Worst
It almost goes without saying that chat is one of the best parts of streaming, hell that’s why most people stream at all. The interaction between streamer and viewer is the main draw for both groups of people.
Your viewers are your supporters, they’re there to be entertained. They might clip things (which helps you generate content), they might shill for you, and they might even support you financially. They crack jokes, they share stories, and they hang out. Chat are my favourite part of streaming.
But chat can be the main source of problems as a streamer. The main people interacting with your stream at any time are your viewers. If someone is going to disrupt your community, they’re likely one of your viewers. Sure, newbies in a space can take a while to find the vibe, some never find it at all, and they can be problematic, but long-time viewers aren’t exempt from causing problems.
Sometimes viewers get too comfortable, and they’ll become increasingly demanding of you. They’ll want you to do things certain ways, or they’ll abuse channel point redemptions, or even turn into backseat gamers. Sometimes they’ll have very strong feelings about a game, positive or negative, that just aren’t meshing with your views and they don’t quite take the hint.
It’s really easy to just let them keep going. They’re a long-time viewer, right? Their support is important, right?
Well… Maybe, but your mental state is more important. You need to set boundaries and shut that stuff down. I, personally, struggle with this, but I need to learn to do better at it.
It might sound mean, but people who can’t fit into their role in the community don’t necessarily belong in the community. It’s up to you where you draw the line, but you need to ensure your spaces are fun for yourself AND for your other viewers.
YOU Are Responsible For Your Spaces
You, the streamer, are ultimately responsible for your spaces. That means you need to set the tone for your chat, and also keep your spaces safe. Twitch is a scary place sometimes, especially if you (or your community) belong to marginalised groups. Right now, there’s all kinds of messed up ‘hate raids’ and ‘bot attacks’ happening, and you need to be protecting your community.
One way to do this is to use Twitch’s tools, such as email and phone number verification. Twitch allows you to stop anyone from sending messages if they haven’t verified their account in some way. This sounds fantastic, in theory, because who has the time to verify hundreds of email addresses and/or phone numbers? Well, it turns out bots do. The bots being used to do these hate raids often have verified email addresses, so Twitch introduced the phone number verification.
Phone number verification works, so far! But it requires your viewers to give their phone number to the evil megacorp (Amazon), which they might be opposed to. Luckily, Twitch has given fine grain controls which should allow most streamers to turn on these features without disrupting the experience of current viewers, even if they haven’t (and won’t or can’t) verify their phone numbers. Here’s is a screenshot of the settings I’m currently using.
Other useful tools include auto-moderation performed by various Twitch Chatbots like Nightbot, Stream Elements, or Streamlabs, as well as more aggressive bots created by community members, and the incredible suite of tools created by CommanderRoot.
Protecting your spaces also means moderating them, which is a HUGE task. While you can definitely do this on your own, it helps to have at least a couple of moderators who can watch chat while you focus on doing your thing. Having a mod team also means that crises in your Discord server can be dealt with while you’re live.
Picking the right mods is vital. Mods set the tone, alongside you. Their decisions shape your community, and they act as role models within your community. If your mods are making jokes, other community members may make similar jokes. If your mods are misbehaving, so too will your community members. Often, this is fine! In my spaces, a bit (a lot) of mischief is appreciated! Sometimes, though, you do need to reign your mods in a little, so that your community stays reigned in too.
Another thing to consider is gating your Discord community. It’s great to have a server that any new viewer can easily join and participate in, but that also means it’s vulnerable to automated attacks. One simple solution is to have some kind of low-level barrier to entry, like having to click a button to agree to the rules. This can be done via some simple role permissions shenanigans, facilitated by a Discord bot such as Zira or MEE6, OR via Discord’s built-in system that forms part of the Community Server tools. Both systems have advantages and disadvantages. For example, the Discord bot solution allows you to show newcomers channels that require their input (whether it be a click button, or for them to confirm their username or age), and then hide those channels once they’ve been granted access. The built-in solution patches up a small chance of a newcomer joining a server that’s got Twitch integration enabled, and bypassing the safeguards by subscribing on Twitch, thus being able to access and post in channels that normally require verification.
Discord also has similar account verification options to Twitch, and they’re worth tightening up.
Twitch… Doesn’t pay.
I mean… It does. It will. A bit. Sorta.
Twitch requires streamers to hit certain goals before they’re able to earn any money at all directly from Twitch itself. Once you hit those, you start being able to earn in the form of Subscriptions, Bits, and Ad Revenue.
Subscriptions make up the main chunk of revenue earned by Affiliates, if not by amount then by predictability. Viewers are able to subscribe to a monthly payment to Twitch, earning them perks such as ad-free viewing of your stream, and custom emotes that you upload. Most stream overlay services (like Stream Elements and Streamlabs) will let subscribers share a short message on stream, either as text or as text-to-speech (or both). The amount they pay, minus myriad fees, is then split 50/50 between you and Twitch. If that sounds like a bit of a shitty deal, it probably is.
Bits are weird. Viewers can send you Bits, which are basically tips made out of Amazon Funbux, and you’ll get 100% of those Bits as earnings. 1 Bit = 1 US cent; 100 Bits = $1 USD. Bits also let users share a message on stream, like subscriptions, if you have the overlays running. The trick here is that Bits cost much more than 1 cent each for the viewers to buy, but they can be spent in any channel after purchase.
Ad Revenue is just what you get paid when Twitch forces ads on your viewers, or when you begrudgingly run the ads yourself. The thing is, for how aggressively Twitch runs ads, and how much they incentivise you running ads, they basically pay nothing. Here is my actual ad revenue for the last 12 months, compared to the 12 months before (when Twitch was less aggressive about ads):
That’s $3.90, less than 1% (0.663ish%) of my total revenue, down from a whopping 1.2% in the previous 12 months. Ad Revenue is basically nil, do not even bother counting it.
The most important thing to talk about though, re:Twitch monetization, is the payout system. Your half of subscriptions, your bits, and your ad revenue all get held in an internal account in Twitch, earning interest for them, until your total reaches $100. Twitch checks this balance on the 1st of the month (ish) and updates your balance (eventually) When it sees $100 in there, the money will be paid out to you, less fees, on the 15th of the month (ish ish, sometimes it even comes early).
“But Talia,” I hear you ask, “how much is my total revenue going to be? How long until I can quit my job and move to full-time streaming?”
Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Well, here’s the thing: you won’t make enough money to quit your job. It’s really that simple.
Why’s that? Well! Thanks to the recent hack and subsequent leaks, we now know a lot about how much people get paid on Twitch. Friend and fellow streamer, HisCursedness (Twitch, YouTube), wrote this great Twitter thread about what we learned from it. The takeaway? You’re more likely to win the lottery than make it big streaming.
And as for total revenue? It’s really not a lot, thanks to the way Twitch makes their money. People paying to support you, via bits and subs, tend not to realise that less than half of the money they spend actually makes it to you. Even fewer of them realise that you may not see that money for several months, until you’ve earned enough for a payout.
So how can you beef up those dollars? How can you, as they say, get that bread? You must construct additional pylons revenue streams.
“But Taliaaaaaaaa, how do I do that?”
Well there’s basically four main options: 1) off-site subscriptions; 2) off-site tips; 3) additional content creation; 4) sponsored content. Let’s investigate those!
Off-site subscriptions
As a creator, one of the safest, most reliable forms of income you can get is monthly subscriptions. They’re reliable, they’re frequent, and you can usually see when people subscribe and unsubscribe, allowing you to estimate your monthly income fairly reliably.
Outside of Twitch, the most common subscription service is Ko-Fi. Ko-Fi allows you to set up custom subscription tiers, allowing more flexibility than Twitch’s tiers. You can set your own benefits up, and Ko-Fi allows you to post content that is visible only to specific tiers. Tier benefits can be tangible, like specific posts being available only to them, or intangible, like weighing their input more heavily when it comes to making decisions.
Ko-Fi also has Discord integration, letting you give your Ko-Fi subs all the same Discord benefits as Twitch Subscribers, or even their own separate ones!
“Okay, so how do I convince people to switch to Ko-Fi?”
Well!
Ko-Fi does take a cut from your revenue, like Twitch, but the cut is MUCH smaller. There are two options, depending on what you need, being 5% or a flat fee. Paypal handles all the processing fees. For comparison, Twitch takes the processing fees out, and then takes 50% of the remainder for themselves.
The streamers I know who use external subscription sites find that just telling people that more of their money makes it to the creator via other sites is enough to get a small, but steady income stream forming. Offering exclusive benefits (like, say, previews of articles like this ahead of their public release) also helps incentivise people to make the switch.
(note: the original version of this article recommended Patreon. Since that time, Patreon has started making indications of moving towards supporting cryptocurrencies, and as such I have switched to Ko-Fi)
Off-site tips
Twitch’s tipping system, Bits, is messy and complicated, and designed to obfuscate the fact that viewers pay ~40% markup on the money they end up giving to you.
Streaming tools like Stream Elements and Streamlabs offer Tipping/Donation pages. These allow you to solicit tips and donations directly from your viewers (or readers), without paying Twitch a dime. The tips are handled by PayPal, and the only fees involved are the ones PayPal imposes on processing cards. This means that at least 90% of the money spent finds its way into your pocket.
Similar to Patreon, simply telling would-be tippers that this is more efficient often helps, and both Stream Elements and Streamlabs allow for tips to have alerts just like Bits do, complete with the text-to-speech robot voice reading their name and message! It’s all the benefits of Twitch Bits, with only one tiny extra inconvenience (have to open another page), AND more of the money goes to the streamer.
Additional content creation
Another way to monetise what you do is to branch out. Streaming won’t earn you enough money on its own, but being in a creative space exposes you to many potential clients if you feel able to monetize one of your other skills. If you’re an artist who can make streaming layouts quickly and efficiently, selling those, either pre-made or by commission, will certainly net you some extra cash. The same goes for emotes, alert animations, sound effects, screen transitions, music, and any other asset even remotely tangential to streaming.
Editing out highlighted videos and uploading them to YouTube seems like one way to eventually earn some more money, but that has all the same issues with monetization and community building that Twitch streaming already has.
Sponsored content
Sponsored content is a divisive one, but it’s worth investigating. Stream Elements regularly offers users the opportunity to work with a developer, usually of a mobile game, to basically advertise their game to viewers. These sponsorships usually come with a quota, requiring x number of people to sign up before you receive a payout, but the payout can be substantial.
The developers behind Raid Shadow Legends have offered several of these deals through Stream Elements, and the payments are in the hundreds of dollars range, increasing as you get more and more signups.
Whether you feel morally or ethically comfortable advertising these games to your viewers is up to you, but the payments can be substantial. It might be a case of just waiting for a game that interests you.
Closing
What I’m really trying to say to you is this:
Streaming isn’t easy. Streaming is performing, and performing is hard work. You need to be juggling many things at once, and protecting people and spaces from bad-faith actors. You will be working hard while you’re “offline”. And, at the end of the day, Twitch won’t be making you tons of money. You will need to make sure you have additional streams of income, and you will end up using almost every skill you have in your arsenal to do so.
Streaming is hard work, and you need to take breaks. If you’re not functioning well, you can’t entertain and protect your community. Look after yourself, temper your expectations, and be kind to your body and mind.