Streaming on Twitch, an Escape for Content Creators?
Launched in 2011, “Twitch is an interactive live-streaming service for content spanning gaming, entertainment, sports, music, and more.” Famous names, such as Pokimane, Valkyrae, Squeezie, Ninja might ring a bell. Some of them stream daily and have a huge following on most social media. But did you they were mostly known for their YouTube channels in the first place?
During the pandemic, Twitch blew up the Internet by gaining more and more streamers, allowing everyone to grow their own communities and share their adventures.
Going Live
Once your Twitch account is born, it takes a few clicks to discover channels based on your interests: gaming, live style, podcast, music…With its subscription system, you can support any streamer at a fair price and pick the duration of it. On any stream, you have a lot of features allowing you to interact with the streamer you’re watching and also the community.
Are you interested to get started? With the proper tools, a good webcam or camera, tutorials and a bit of patience, you can easily start your adventure and build a community. Once you reach a certain number of followers and watch-time, you can get affiliated and slowly (but surely) earn money from streaming on Twitch.
A Safe Space Away From YouTube?
As mentioned in the introduction, there are a lot of content creators from YouTube streaming on Twitch. At first glance, we could think it’s a marketing strategy because it gives them yet another platform to be seen and earn money, but reality is very different.
For the past few years, YouTube policy has been very damaging for a lot of content creators, either because of copyright claims (justified or not), or strikes coming out of nowhere, threatening the very existence of YouTube channels with content worth years of creation and dedication (3 strikes = channel automatically deleted).
Briefly, whenever you upload a video on YouTube, the content is first assessed by robots to check if you are not breaking any guidelines, they also estimate if the audience needs to be age-restricted or not and if your video can be monetized. Here, you’re either lucky and your content is officially on YouTube or…worse case scenario, it needs a second assessment. This time, it’s made by an actual human. Is it a good thing? Yes and no. You could either have someone very biased or very chill. If at the end of the day, YouTube decided to block your video or something above, you can always try to claim for another assessment by another person.
With that pressure and fear of losing everything, it’s not a surprise if content creators stream on Twitch on the side: it allows them to chill while providing entertainment for their followers until the next YouTube video gets uploaded.
Conclusion
Twitch is definitely an open window for new opportunities, different content from streamers all around the world. If you’re successful, you could even get brand deals, sponsorship, collabs and more!
