Twitch

[Guest]

This sounds like an unfortunate mess, but that's always the danger of investment into this industry. 

Having gone thru "investors" (aka sponsors) when I was auto racing there is a lot of promise and a lot of nothing delivered or in most cases the funding promises turn into "product discount" ... only to find the product is unproven and usually fails at my expense (aka destroys a motor).  I've had auto racing friends that "joined" force with a larger team owner Lou Gillotti in the hope of more funding ... turned out the joining of forces was so that Lou could bleed them of money and further his own race team.  When it comes to money it's dog eat dog in the racing world.

I feel sorry for both Matt and Nico, they obviously had good intentions that just didn't pan out ... the positive is a lesson learned.  I hope they both continue with flight simulation and re-group and come up with a more sustainable plan.

On a side note what is Twitch?  I've heard that term, just not familiar with it and what it does or doesn't do?

Cheers, Rob.

 

[Jim Young 2,356]

4 minutes ago, Rob Ainscough said:

On a side note what is Twitch?

https://www.twitch.tv/

[ErichB 3,642]

6 minutes ago, Rob Ainscough said:

On a side note what is Twitch?  I've heard that term, just not familiar with it and what it does or doesn't do?

It;s a streaming website for PC and console gaming of all kinds.  Flightsim is one of them.

[Woozie 732]

1 hour ago, Rob Ainscough said:

On a side note what is Twitch?  I've heard that term, just not familiar with it and what it does or doesn't do?

Its basically the new money grabbing platform for content creators after YouTube changed its monetizing scheme to be no longer profitable for channels with less than 1 million subs. 

Twitch isnt much different as it pays you based on how many viewers watching your streams, but live streaming offers additional, much more profitable, ways of earning money through donations and subscriptions coming from your live audience. Most even have a live ticker showing most recent sponsors and how much they donated. Which, strangely, motivates others to gift you even more (some donate up to 100$ each time). Just think of it like throwing dollar bills at a stripper (aah, good ol' times!).

Additionally to that, you can get people to "subscribe" to your stream, which means they pay money for....well....following you. Although twitch is completely free to use and you can "heart" streamers for free (like subscribing a channel on youtube) in order to be notified when they go live. 

Now, in return, streamers address their shee...ehm, viewers directly by greeting them when they join and thank them for every single donation they make, so actual content and information takes the backseat here in order to please the attention seeking audience...

And in order to give their audience enough time to donate, some streamers broadcast for several hours, Matts recent stream was 11 hours (!!!) in total

Now compare all this to the good old best practices for successful content on youtube: You would need to prepare properly, have a script, ensure the videos are not too long and provide content and information to ensure that people come back to your channel and generate views. And theres no live interaction that would distract you from providing actual content....

 

 

Edited October 22, 2018 by Woozie

[Guest]

Woozie, fantastic description of Twitch. LOL

Reminds me of how an old sea dog once described a yacht mooring;

"A piece of concrete placed on the bottom of a creek by a thief for which a fool in a boat hands over his hard earned money."

[Woozie 732]

2 minutes ago, ganter said:

"A piece of concrete placed on the bottom of a creek by a thief for which a fool in a boat hands over his hard earned money."

Haha, brilliant! 😄

[Guest]

Twitch makes me itch... I seriously can’t stand all that improvised word not allowed. The same with 95% of YouTube’s content. Those video’s in which you hear people mumble things like ‘er...’, ‘eh...’, what the...?’, ‘let’s see...’, ‘ehm...’, ‘what’s this...?’, ‘so what does this button do...?’, ‘I think this is er...’, ‘well, now...’, ‘wait...’, ‘no...’, ‘what happened here...?’, ‘what happened there...?’, ‘what was that...?’, ‘okay, sooooo...’ Yikes, annoying as hell.

[Woozie 732]

4 minutes ago, J van E said:

Twitch makes me itch... I seriously can’t stand all that improvised word not allowed. The same with 95% of YouTube’s content. Those video’s in which you hear people mumble things like ‘er...’, ‘eh...’, what the...?’, ‘let’s see...’, ‘ehm...’, ‘what’s this...?’, ‘so what does this button do...?’, ‘I think this is er...’, ‘well, now...’, ‘wait...’, ‘no...’, ‘what happened here...?’, ‘what happened there...?’, ‘what was that...?’, ‘okay, sooooo...’ Yikes, annoying as hell.

Yes, they all moved over to twitch now as they were disappointed that their content didnt earn them a fortune like that squeaky swedish guy who now lives in a massive villa in Beverly Hills

[Guest]

48 minutes ago, Woozie said:

And in order to give their audience enough time to donate, some streamers broadcast for several hours, Matts recent stream was 11 hours (!!!) in total

Sounds like a lot of work (11 hours).  So Twitch is like YouTube's live streaming?  I noticed "Mentour Pilot" on YouTube follows a similar live stream with donations where he will answer questions for those that donate to his stream.  It's an interesting way to get some extra cash, wonder if the effort to reward ratio is worth it?  I've never considered YouTube as a means to supplement income, but I guess it works for some (or many) … is payment based on subscriptions or do they have to click on an advertiser link or something?  On YouTube I thought you had to actually click on the advertiser link in order to be counted towards whatever goal pays back and subscriptions and/or views are fairly meaningless? 

Anyway, more power to them, if the model works for them and viewers.

Is Twitch entirely "gaming" focused?

Cheers, Rob.

[Stavros 295]

Not entirely gaming focused, rob, there are various people live-streaming real life events or music or things like Q&As or Quasi-TV shows. In general though the majority of the content is gaming focused or at least tangentially related like PC building, tech talk, etc. 

 

 

[Woozie 732]

45 minutes ago, Rob Ainscough said:

Sounds like a lot of work (11 hours).  So Twitch is like YouTube's live streaming?  I noticed "Mentour Pilot" on YouTube follows a similar live stream with donations where he will answer questions for those that donate to his stream.  It's an interesting way to get some extra cash, wonder if the effort to reward ratio is worth it?  I've never considered YouTube as a means to supplement income, but I guess it works for some (or many) … is payment based on subscriptions or do they have to click on an advertiser link or something?  On YouTube I thought you had to actually click on the advertiser link in order to be counted towards whatever goal pays back and subscriptions and/or views are fairly meaningless? 

Anyway, more power to them, if the model works for them and viewers.

Is Twitch entirely "gaming" focused?

Cheers, Rob.

11 hours sounds like a lot of work, yes. but it largely depends on how much effort they put into their streaming. Some literally just record themselves sitting in front of their PC on a Sunday afternoon and playing games, not much different to what they would do if no one watches them. 

Its much like YT's livestreaming, but the Twitch platform is built entirely around streaming and offers all the necessary tools and API's to run a full professional setup including overlays and PIP features. I would say the "effort to reward" ratio is much better compared to YT content as it usually requires less preparation (most streamers take a rather "improvised" approach) and all the post processing work necessary for quality YT content isnt required here. On the other hand, your content only really creates revenue while its streamed, not like YT where uploaded videos can earn money for a long time as long as they keep generating new views. Streams can be archived on twitch and made available on demand, but you cant upload videos that havent been streamed on the platform. 

Payment is based on both, number of viewers (plays a rather small part) and donations or subscriptions through Twitch' own payment system. i guess Twitch will take a small commission from every payment made through the platform. Donations are simply gifted money while paid subscriptions can provide some perks for the subscriber. Like a special icon next to the username in Twitch chat, similar to the donor tag here at AVSIM. As a channel owner you can even customize the subscription structure and offer multi-tier subscriptions, etc. 

If you are member of YT's advertising program, you get revenue for simply allowing to place ads in your videos. Viewers dont actually have to click on an ad but i suppose every click will get you a revenue boost. 

Twitch was created as a game streaming platform, but it has other content as well. Not sure if the TOS allow everything to be streamed (apart from adult stuff of course) or if its restricted to gaming content but they dont do much to shut down non gaming streams. 

 

Edited October 22, 2018 by Woozie

[SKEWR 364]

Re Twitch (formerly JustinTV):

I watch it a lot. So I'll try to speak a bit on it.

Anyone can start on Twitch. The PlayStation 4 will let you stream games from it to Twitch out of the box. I think the GEForce experience software will enable this as well. As you get more viewers and followers, and if you can get a certain number per week to watch your streams, you get partnered. Partnered is where you can get subscriptions to your channels from viewers at $4.99 per person. (When you are subbed it just means you can post custom emotes in chat, link webpages in chat and possibly request songs) The streamer gets half and Twitch gets half. If you become really big (not certain of the number, but I believe over 5000 subs), you can negotiate that $4.99 rate where you can get 60-40 or 75-25.

 

On Twitch, there are several non gaming options and they are adding more. Non-gaming include ASMR (Autonomous sensory meridian response: basically making noises and changing those noises), IRL (In Real Life. People just streaming what they do during the day: There is are IRLs of a mechanic at work, a garbageman, folks on vacation to exotic places, etc...), Chatting (Streamer interacts with the audience all stream), cooking, digital art creation, DJing, etc... However, it is mostly traditional video games.

 

BTW, P3D streams are still found under "Microsoft Flight Simulator" and usually have less than 500 viewers.  For comparison, popular games can get as high as 300k viewers (normally they average around 100k+)

 

I tried watching "Belynz" (Matt Davies) a few times, but he and his chat were talking about things that I disliked. Nothing worse than an un-moderated group of trolls. IMO; he seems to be sort of a tragic figure under the bluster. Nico (Twitch name "DAL213" aka Sponsor) may have seen something similar and put him out front to take the blame, but whatever happened, the hope for me is that Matt can remove that bluster. At least until he is actually successful on these major projects.

 

PS: Whether you like Nico or no, you should check out DAL213's Twitch page to see that home cockpit setup.

[Guest]

There's some Thread Drift going on here.

Google is your friend for researching Twitch: Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitch.tv

This is a discussion about Matt Davies and his recent announcement here:

https://mettarsim.com/2018/10/20/learn-from-my-mistakes/

Can we stay on topic please because I think there are things that need to be said.

 

[Woozie 732]

Here's a breakdown of one of the most successful twitch streamers with more than 10 million followers, he's earning about 5 mio $ per year with twitch streaming. I'm not sure if those numbers are guesstimates or actually officially published figures. 

• Metrics
  • Twitch subscribers - 94,369
  • Average Viewers Per Week - 81,654
  • Average Bit Cheers - 2,636,291
• Revenue
  • Subscription - $3,955,571
  • Ad - $509,521
  • Bit Donations - $316,354.92
  • Average Sponsorship - $600,000
  • Average Estimated YouTube Compensation - $36,000

As you can see, you can make quite a bit of money with a rather small number of viewers compared to how many views you tube content needs to provide a substancial income. But as i already mentioned, on twitch, you only really earn money while you are live. 

[Jim Young 2,356]

Thinking about splitting the twitch tv comments to a new topic.  We have seemed to have gotten away from the OP.