Tag: twitch

Live performances aren’t for me

Taylor BurianLeave a comment

What was the last live performance you saw?

In the past I’ve never been big on going to concerts. Probably because I don’t like being surrounded by thousands of strangers (which is also likely why I don’t go out of my way to go to conventions.)

That being said, I will go if I’m not going alone. The number of live performances I have been to can be counted with just my two hands, and the last one was in 2019.

TwitchCon ’19 was the first major convention I had ever been to (that I can recall, though I may have been to one as a real little kid back in Denver) and on the second night of the three days they had an after party. Twitch rented out the entire baseball stadium, Petco Park, which was a convenient walk from the convention center. They had all the beer and food vendors open on the lower level, and you had the choice of sitting in the stands or being down on the field (with the ability to go back and forth as you wanted) during the performance.

Originally, Lil Nas X was supposed to headline the event with Blink-182, but he backed out last minute. Instead, we got an awesome last minute surprise headliner of rapper Logic. It was my first and so far only time getting to see any of them live, so I can at least scratch that off my non-existent concert bucket list.

It was a great show, overall, even with the overpriced stadium food, but I haven’t been to any of the following TwitchCon events since. COVID-19 kind of ruined that for everyone.

How I use social media

Taylor BurianLeave a comment

How do you use social media?

Social media is very different today from when I first started with Myspace 20 years ago.

I went from Myspace into Facebook during high school, with Myspace being abandoned after only a few years. Facebook was the core of my social media use for the majority of all this time. At first I was using it to seem interesting and garner the attention of my peers (like most teenagers and young adults in college did) while staying connected with them and my family. That has long since changed. Now I don’t even post anything on Facebook, or hardly use it at all, except to stay connected with family and very select friends.

When Twitter (I refuse to call it anything else) came along, I didn’t jump on it right away. When I did eventually start using it I hadn’t yet started streaming on Twitch, but that is what it ultimately became. My connection and attempts at increasing engagement. Just like everyone else. Instagram went much the same way when I finally took the plunge into that territory. The difference being that I had also begun shifting into painting miniatures, so I was trying to share my work while advertising my Twitch channel.

Somewhere in the mix of all of that I also started writing again. I had the grand idea of trying to mesh writing together with all of those platforms. I tried to create engagement with my Twitch audience by allowing requests for me to write something for them based on points. All of that was supposed to be shared here on the blog, and I did good at first but obviously that didn’t go anywhere and I still have a backlog of requests.

At some point I backed off of streaming because of the amount of time and effort it required, which I was struggling to afford when work was taking up a lot of my mental and emotional bandwidth. I tried to continue using Instagram to share my work with painting the miniatures, and I still do that today to a small degree whenever I finish something and feel inclined to share.

Now there are some other social media platforms out there, like Threads, which I have reserved my typical username on but I never really use (just like all the others.) Instead, I’ve been focusing on writing here on the blog and in my private note space for the stories I’m developing.

That should cover my history and current usage of social media. Maybe it will change again in the future, but who knows?

Streaming takes a lot

Taylor BurianLeave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What’s something most people don’t understand?
View all responses

I feel like the vast majority of people who see people posting dumb shit on social media and YouTube don’t fully understand the effort that can go into content creation.

Now, this also includes the people who decide to post that dumb shit, because a lot of them start off with the mentality “oh that’s easy, I can do that too, and I’ll make millions!” That’s not the case. At all. Granted, the most popular people on social media had to start somewhere but there is also the element of luck to consider.

Putting luck aside, the effort that the SUCCESSFUL people on social media and streaming platforms put in is incredible and varies depending on the style of content they’re choosing to create. In my case I can at least talk about streaming since I did that off and on for years as a hobby.

Most people don’t understand the amount of time and effort that gets invested into streaming. You might think it’s as easy as pushing a button to stream to the world and just sit at your desk playing games for a few hours, but there is much more to it than that. Especially if you have any intent to turn it into a “career” of some kind. You need the right equipment/software and know how to use it. You need to understand the target audience. What games do you like? What games do THEY like? What is your style of game play and audience interaction? Are you really good at a particular game, or are you clever/witty/funny? What’s the best time to stream at and can it fit into your schedule? How are you reaching your target audience to let them know you’re live? Are you streaming often enough? Are you limiting yourself to just streaming on a single platform or are you branching out somehow? What are the current trends in gaming? How do you get ahead of everyone and not feel like you’re riding on the coattails of big streamers who are nearing the end of their time interested in a game or genre? Boiling it all down into a singular question “How do you go from pushing the Live button to making it into a career?”

More and more questions your should be asking yourself the further you go down that rabbit hole. You can’t just record yourself doing something silly or dumb and expect to be famous the next day. People who experience that are incredibly lucky, and chances are it’s a flash in the pan kind of moment and it’ll never happen again. You can increase your odds of success by answering the questions I asked above and putting in the effort, but even then, it isn’t a guarantee.

If you want to break it down into something quantifiable like making a living then you can look into the numbers that are out there, but I can at least provide a hypothetical example for you to chew on.

on Twitch a Tier 1 sub costs a user US$4.99 before taxes. The streamer receives a 50% cut of that. Using nice even numbers that puts it US$2.50. If you were lucky enough to live in a part of the country where the cost of living was cheap, and you had no debts, and you could live off US$50,000 per year, what does that equate to in Twitch subs? That’s 20,000 subs. I don’t have the actual Follower to Subscriber conversion percentages at hand as I’m writing this, but if you were fortunate enough to have 20% of your followers convert to subs, you would need 100,000 followers on Twitch. Let me share a tweet with you all to offer some perspective. CommanderRoot shares a lot of fascinating statistics, and this tweet of theirs from December of 2020 likely still holds some truth to it in 2024. https://x.com/CommanderRoot/status/1336488690986717184

By the end of 2020 less than 4,000 streamers on the entire Twitch platform had greater than 100,000 followers. There are roughly 7,000,000 streamers on Twitch today in 2024, so assuming the numbers haven’t changed drastically between then and now we can do some more math. Using nice even numbers, if my math is right, that means approximately 0.06% of streamers on the entire platform meet the completely hypothetical criteria I set before. (Personally, I’d say the criteria are very optimistic compared to whatever the real numbers are.)

This is why I say most people don’t understand the effort that goes into streaming. If you want this to be a career and you have nothing else going for you, if you want to keep trying, then maybe someday you’ll get up there, but it’s going to take a TREMENDOUS amount of time and effort that you’re not going to get back, and this is all just in streaming on Twitch. At the core of all of this, you can figure out the basic idea and apply it to other forms of content creation, like writing. Follow the questions, follow the numbers, get your answer. No matter what you’re doing, do you understand it enough to know where to aim yourself?