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Competing Interests

Have you ever wondered how to succeed on Twitch, and gone looking for advice regarding that? I know I have, and YouTube is chock full of videos offering said advice, which is both good and bad. It’s good that there are plenty of videos giving advice on at least making Affiliate on Twitch, but it’s also bad because most of these videos are complete shit.

Sorry, but they are. When they aren’t all saying basically the same thing over and over, the unique advice they tend to give is either something any moron would be able to figure out on their own, or is useless for most livestreamers.

If you’d like to know how to make Affiliate on Twitch, let me tell you what you need to do, as someone who is relatively new to the platform, but made it rather quickly. Be advised that some of this advice might not be palatable to some folk, but I guarantee it is 100% accurate, nonetheless.

The #1 most important thing you need to know about making Affiliate is that you need to get noticed. Some people will find this easier than others (for example, teen to college-age ladies showing a bit of cleavage will get noticed really damn quick), but the best way to get noticed, regardless of who you are, is by choosing the right game. Period, it’s that simple.

Listen, I like playing “World of Warcraft” as much as the next geek, but trying to get anywhere as a new livestreamer while playing WoW is pretty much asking to fail. Why? There are simply too many people playing the game on Twitch, which means it is nearly impossibly to get noticed.

Instead, if you want to livestream gaming content on Twitch, do some basic math. Break out your trusty calculator, browse for your favorite games on Twitch, and run the following equation for them:

Number of people watching ÷ Number of Streamers playing that game = X

Now then, if you want to succeed on Twitch, you need to find a game where X is as high as possible. For example, as of the time I am writing this blog post, there are 289 people watching “Guild Wars 2” livestreams. This from a pool of 38 GW2 livestreamers. So for GW2, X would currently equate to 7.6, which isn’t too bad. But compare that to “Elder Scrolls Online”, which has 742 viewers from a pool of 18 streamers, which works out to an X Score of 41.2, and you can see ESO is a much better choice for livestreaming (at this moment).

Some people might say that you simply need to play the more popular games, then, to get a higher result, and that’s not necessarily wrong, but still not a right answer, either. While you want a high result for X in that equation, you also don’t want to be drowning in competition, either. When I go to my Browse page on Twitch, I can see the top 15 results for any particular game without having to scroll down. You need to be in those top 15 or so results, or few people will see your stream regardless of how popular the game might be. So for the two examples above, neither may end up being a good result for a new livestreamer, because your show won’t be immediately visible to people searching for that game.

But what about a game like “Secret World Legends”? Currently, it has one person streaming it, and seven viewing, coming out to a solid 7.0 score. Better yet, that person is streaming in Chinese (being from Taiwan), so an English-language stream might strip off a good portion of those viewers right off the bat! Sure, it isn’t as enticing as GW2 or ESO’s numbers, but you are sure to show prominently in the search results, which is the primary thing getting started: You need to get noticed!

How did I get to Affiliate in less than six weeks? First of all, I played “Lord of the Rings Online” primarily. It is a small game on Twitch (zero streamers with – obviously – zero viewers at the moment, but it’s also the middle of the night here, Monday morning elsewhere), which allowed me to get noticed almost immediately. Then I made friends with several viewers and other streamers, who helped me network some, and in almost no time at all I had the requisite 50+ Followers, 3 Viewer Average, and 7 days streamed in the last 30 days to make Affiliate! I have then pushed harder, and am now sitting on 137 Followers, 18 days Streamed out of the last 30, with an average of over 6 Viewers per stream in that time.

Yes, I know that isn’t a huge amount of Followers or Viewers, but it is more than enough to keep me comfortably locked into Affiliate status, while I continue to do my thing and slowly build a fanbase. Unless you are a college-age female hottie, no one is an overnight success on Twitch, and even then nothing is guaranteed. You have to have drive, a love for making content, and a unique “voice” (your own personal style, a likable personality, a cool shtick, etc), to make it long-term on the platform. And I’m singing – yes, singing – and chatting my way there, bit by bit, over time.

But all other advice aside, you can’t get anywhere on Twitch if no one knows your stream exists. So find an obscure game livestreamed by only a few people, but which might be of interest to viewers, and fire up OBS!

Scormus
I'm the editor, publisher, and primary "talent" here at Scormey.com.
https://scormey.com

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