In the last year, I’ve gone from streaming to zero people to just hitting Twitch Affiliate with an average viewership of 10 people per stream. While that may not seem like a lot, for a lot of new streamers it is and I wanted to share what has worked best for me over the past year in growing my livestream.
I’m not an expert, nor do I have all the answers, but this one change will probably help you out more than you realize. I’m not the first person to talk about it, nor will I be the last, but as this YouTube channel continues to grow, I feel it’s something worth talking about that may just help you if you’re stuck like I was a year ago!
I see streamer after streamer streaming to an audience of zero, yet they are streaming five, six or even seven days a week for hours upon end while that number doesn’t seem to move.
Maybe… you’re streaming too much?
ROLL THE INTRO!
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The link for my twitch page as always will be down in the description below!
Alright, with the formalities out of the way, let’s dive in!
By now, you’ve probably heard that Twitch doesn’t have an algorithm that necessarily helps out new streamers.
In fact, up until recently, in order to appear near the top of the list in any particular game, you had to have the most viewers compared to other streamers.
While they have recently added a new “recommended for you” sorting option, overall the platform still lacks the discover-ability that you can achieve on a lot of other platforms, whether that’s YouTube, Twitter, or more recently, TikTok.
What this means for the average new streamer is that you could stream for hours per day, seven days a week, and still not have anyone seeing your livestream on Twitch.
Let’s be honest, most people are not scrolling to the bottom of a game’s page on Twitch to streamers that have zero viewers and even the few that do, there is so much competition on Twitch nowadays that even the zero viewer streams are saturated.
This means the chance someone clicks in to your stream is extremely low!
This may make you feel a bit defeated, but the truth is there is one thing you can do to change that and if you do, you’ll be ahead of 90% of all other streamers…
Make content on other platforms that do offer discoverability.
For example, this video you’re watching right now on YouTube. At the start of this video I mentioned I livestream on Twitch, I also include links to my channel in the description below and most of the people currently watching my stream, has come from seeing one of my YouTube videos in which I help other streamers with tutorials, reviews, etc.
In fact, it has been the single biggest thing I’ve done to grow my Twitch viewership. But not only has my Twitch viewership grown by creating content on YouTube, so has my YouTube audience, creating an additional revenue stream for myself and an additional place to build a community! A community of streamers looking to help each other out and build each other up!
You don’t have to create content for YouTube, in fact, it’s a lot of work, but even re-purposing content from your streams to post on other social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook or TikTok and then using that content to drive people to your stream on Twitch will be time much better spent when it comes to Twitch growth.
Not just creating content on other social media platforms, but interacting with other gamers, streamers and content creators will then get more eyeballs on your own stuff. Becoming part of the community as a whole instead of just sitting on a livestream asking the community to come support you!
So am I saying the days of simply growing by streaming on Twitch over? Maybe not, I’m sure there is someone out there, who is just starting out streaming, that does absolutely nothing other than fire up their livestream that will grow in to a successful streamer eventually. But how long will it take with Twitch’s platform? And how rare is that nowadays?
So how much time should you actually be streaming nowadays versus creating other content or interacting on other social media platforms? In my opinion, three days a week for about four hours per stream is the max you should be doing.
The reason for this is because it typically takes about an hour of streaming before you hit the peak of your current followers joining in to your livestream. This number stays up until about the 4 hour mark which is when your viewership typically starts to decline again. As we know, not only is average viewers important if you’re trying to hit affiliate or partner status on Twitch, but it also matters when trying to rank higher up the list for games. This means outside that period you’re essentially just wasting time as a new streamer.
This time could instead be used as I said to then go through your stream and pull out funny, exciting, amazing clips that you could then post on social media sites and then provide a link back to your Twitch page. In fact, it doesn’t even have to be clips, you could create original content like I do on YouTube and that could fuel growth as well.
Now maybe you’re sitting there, watching this video and thinking to yourself, but I don’t want to create content elsewhere. I just want to stream and have people watch me. And I get it, I really do, but the reality is, with the current competition happening around this space, it’s almost impossible to succeed that way. As you grow will you be able to eventually pull back on creating content elsewhere? Maybe, but for now…I don’t think there’s much of a choice.
If you’re serious about succeeding in this, it’s gonna take work. Hard work. Gone are the days of Twitch where you can simply turn on a livestream and sit there and play a video game and expect viewers to come in to your channel and I have a feeling it’s only going to get more competitive in the future.
And the truth is, if you’re not willing to put in the work it takes, you most likely will not succeed… because there will be someone else who is willing.