No, you should not be a streamer in 2022, now before you jump into any conclusions about what i just said, yes, you can be a streamer in 2022 but no you should not be a streamer in 2022.
I know that sounds confusing so let's just get into the video, i'll explain what i'm talking about so you're not sitting here like man uh eagle gear really just has no idea what he's talking about, i'll explain it it'll all make sense i promise.
Like i said in the beginning of this video no you should not be a streamer in 2022 now let me explain what that means, i am a streamer on twitch and i've been streaming on twitch for almost five years, now and in that period of time i have learned a lot about being a streamer.
Streaming has taken on a whole new form and is really a lot harder than it used to be even though it was tough when i started it took me a long time to get you know going and built up i've gotten to the place now where i'm a partner streamer with twitch and i am a full-time streamer but it hasn't always been that way and there are some steps that i took in that process and in that journey that were crucial in helping me get to those points and so i'm going to share those with you today guys but also explain why you shouldn't be a streamer in 2022.
You can still stream and i know it sounds weird like i said but the simple reason for this is because becoming a streamer is not enough anymore, being just a streamer on twitch or being just a streamer on youtube or just a streamer on facebook is not going to cut it in today's current content environment.
Now the reason for this especially when we're talking about twitch which is where i stream is because twitch just doesn't have a lot of good discoverability right now and even though they're taking steps to try to improve some of that a little by little they haven't done anything that is impactful enough to make twitch a viable option for someone to jump into and really get going.
Now it does not mean that this is the truth across the board for everybody now you're always going to have the exception to the rule the outlier or the person that kind of breaks the the standard mold and it works for them somebody may start to stream on twitch and they don't do anything anywhere else and they blow up right that can always happen but there's a lot of intricacies when it comes to somebody finding success in streaming that a lot of us just don't have going for us.
There's a lot of luck potentially involved and just kind of rng as we call it right, there's also networking that comes into play a lot of people that are finding success today a lot quicker than most of us are also you know connected with the right people they have friends that have already found success on twitch and they can kind of grow with them they've got some level of exposure somehow maybe they had a following from somewhere else that they could bring over but there's a lot of different things that go into play.
If you are starting from scratch and you're becoming a twitch streamer it's just not as viable to do that alone and i'm going to show you a graph that basically explains what i'm talking about so you can get a better visual representation for why growth on twitch today is so much harder than it used to be back when i first started and even before that.
So here we are on twitchtracker.com this is a website that basically tracks all the statistics for
twitch for the last however many years and so you can go back and see an overview if you go over here to statistics or stats and you click on this and you go to overview, this is going to show you an overview for twitch since i think around 2013 so we're going to scroll down a little bit and they have this thing called viewers to streamers and it's a ratio chart.
Basically right viewers to streamers and so you can see back in like 2000 actually was 2012 september 2012 twitch had a ratio you see that ratio right there of 39.2 that means that for every one streamer that was on twitch on average there were 39.2 viewers now this took every streamer they averaged them out but there was about 39.2 viewers uh per streamer on twitch and so this was actually this is actually pretty good especially by today's standards and as you see as twitch kind of grew in popularity it got up into almost the 50 area 49.8 in
november of 2012.
So uh you had a good opportunity to grow a following in a base of viewers fairly quickly just by streaming because there were a lot less streamers at this point than there were viewers, if you look there were about 2 206 streamers and 109 000 average viewers in november of 2012. That is a pretty good ratio. You know what i'm saying 2 200 streamers you're competing with 2 000 other people as far as you know viewership.
Trying to get more viewership on your channel and you were kind of in a small pool of
people actually creating content on twitch but as you can see and you see these two lines down here at the bottom this shows a growing number of viewers and streamers and it shows up here at the top the ratio of viewers to streamers and as you can see these lines continually get closer and closer and closer until right here in 2000 what was it right here in 2018 the end of 2018 this line finally crossed and now there were actually uh the ratio was going below the number of streamers and viewers on twitch and this has continued on until you hit right here in january 2020 when really we started fully getting into the whole pandemic situation and that sort of thing and it crossed and boom you have this explosion of people that are at home they're out of work out of school and they're looking for something
to do or maybe they have now the time to invest in something they've always been interested in like streaming and there's a massive influx right and that ratio continues to drop now it has been slightly on the the rise again as people have started to go back in to work in school and things like that but you can see there's a huge gap here and so that ratio is now down into the 20s.
And this is across the board on average which means it is so much harder it is so much harder to you know get any type of attention on twitch get viewership things like that because now you're competing with an average at any given time of over a hundred thousand other people that are streaming at any given point on twitch right a hundred thousand people streaming uh and there's about three million people viewer wise so this ratio has gone down it is adjusted.
You can see that it's just not as easy to get viewership right it's just not as easy to get viewership because your competition has skyrocketed and even though there are more viewers there's a lot more streamers so i'm showing you guys this chart to explain that being a streamer now you can't just go live on twitch and people will find you because you're only
one of two thousand now you're one of a hundred thousand.
Actually it's more than that because just because you're live at a given time there's a hundred thousand other people live doesn't mean that you're only competing with a hundred thousand people because there are actually millions of streamers every month we're just talking on any current period of time right now but when you're streaming there's a hundred
thousand other people you're competing with but in a given month as far as community growth goes you're actually competing with more.
Right down here if we scroll down to twitch growth monthly broadcasters 2021 8.68 million
right 8.68 million just because there are an average of a hundred and six thousand concurrent channels live meaning that there are a hundred and six thousand people live at any given time that you're streaming there are almost over eight and a half million people
right per month that actually streams on twitch and now we're just looking at twitch right here.
I'm not even talking about youtube or facebook or any of those platforms because twitch is one of the main uh and the biggest streaming platforms there is but 8.68 million people per month that you are basically trying to build a community amongst right these are all the different community representations on twitch people that go live every month and this is continued, look you can see this has continued to grow back in 2012 300 000 total people per month went live and 2 000 at any given time so you really had a great chance for people to find you back then.
Now every month you're just one of almost nine million right and and so it's gonna be so much harder to grow and we've got to get this into our mind we've got to understand this because it's not enough to be a streamer anymore you should not be a streamer in 2022 you've got to start changing your opinion and your outlook when it comes to streaming, you
can't just be a streamer you have to be something different.
Being different means you're not a streamer but you should start looking at yourself as a content creator, a content creator is somebody who is not bound by just one type of content but rather creates content on multiple platforms right if you're a streamer that alludes to the
fact that you basically create content on only twitch right and this is not always true because most streamers are actually content creators they create content on twitter or tiktok or youtube or these other places but you've got to get out of the mindset of i want to be a streamer because a lot of people go into streaming thinking i just want to stream i don't want to edit videos i don't want to create content other places i want to get on i want to go live i want to talk to people i want to end the stream and i don't want to think about streaming until the next time i'm getting ready to go live, that is not enough you can't get by with that anymore.
Back in the day people could do that and it worked but it doesn't work in 2022 and it actually hasn't been working for a couple of years now right this is something that's continually a problem and we've got to adjust the mindset of everybody who wants to stream into saying okay i'm not going to become a streamer to become a streamer i'm going to become a streamer as part of my content creator journey.
Okay so basically you have to give yourself the opportunity to create content on multiple platforms and if you want to be a streamer that can be your main thing but you have to look at it as basically the end-all-be-all spot that everything else that you're doing is going to funnel into so let me give you a little bit of a picture of what this looks like instead of being just a streamer where you go live on.
Let's say twitch every day four or five times a week right and you're trying to do it full time or maybe you're just doing part time as a hobby instead of doing that on twitch and spending all your time on twitch give yourself a schedule every week where you can go live at specific times on twitch but have other times available during the week to create content on youtube and actually i have a rule which i'm trying to figure out a good title for but we're just going to call it the triple play for right now.
The triple play is you pick three places that you want to create content and you focus on those three places, now if you can create content on more than three different platforms absolutely do it but if you can have at least three platforms that you're active in creating content on this is gonna give you the best chance for growth as a content creator and ultimately if your heart is really for being a streamer this is the best chance you're going to have for being successful at streaming.
So for instance let's say that you're always on twitter even outside of content creation you're
just always on twitter it's your favorite platform or maybe it's tiktok or maybe it's you know facebook or whatever it is for you on top of that you need to include youtube and then of
course your streaming platform let's say twitch okay so now you have the triple play you've got three places that you're going to create content one being a social media platform that is a more direct informal place that you can give updates and people can kind of keep up with what's going on in your life, the other two places are what we're going to consider to be more formal primary content outlets.
Okay so youtube and twitch in this example youtube is going to be your long-term discoverable content, twitch is going to be your then and now live interaction content what this means is that you're going to have an ecosystem all working together where people can keep up with you when you're not live right on twitter you they can keep up with you when you are live via twitch and they can find your content at any point in time no matter what time of day or night it is on youtube.
Now if you do this the right way you can actually farm content out of your twitch live streams
by making very planned and scheduled things within your stream let's say you want to cover a certain topic you want to talk about something you want to show something in a game you're going to record that segment out of your twitch stream and you're going to do it with
the idea that you are then going to turn that into a youtube video later.
There's different ways you can do this, you can actually go ahead and do the entire youtube video live in front of your audience or you can just start giving them the information and make it more of a natural part of your stream, take that portion make sure you record it while
you're doing it or download the highlight later and then you're gonna do an intro and outro that's a little bit more formal that you put at the beginning and the end of that video for youtube.
Once you get that edited up you're gonna put that on youtube and you're gonna direct people in that video back to your twitch stream okay so you're farming content out of your
twitch stream you're putting it onto youtube and then you're farming content from your youtube and the viewers on your youtube and sending them back over to twitch so they can interact with you, in the meantime you're also mentioning that third social media option whether it be twitter, tiktok, instagram, whatever where people can go and kind of keep up with you in your life and your opinions and things like that when you're not actually live or in a video.
This triple play as we call it is going to be the best possible scenario for you in 2022 to grow as a content creator, it's not enough like i said to be just a twitch streamer anymore but you can still be a twitch streamer as long as you are not just that you've got to be a content creator if we can all get ourselves in the mindset of being a content creator it's really going to
change the game guys i'm telling you right now because it wasn't until i started implementing these things in my own stream that i started to see real genuine tangible growth to the point
where i could actually become partnered with twitch and make it a full-time career right and now i do content creation not just streaming but content creation full-time.
I make these videos here on youtube, we work with sponsors we do live streams on twitch i am on twitter all the time, still need to work on tiktok and instagram but at least i've got my three main places and then on top of that we've got a thriving discord community which i will tell you discord is probably the kind of secret fourth right you've got your triple play and then you need to have a discord on there because discord is going to be the hub of your community.
No matter what they're watching right that's where everybody from everywhere can go hang out and you can communicate directly with your audience from all of those places combined so add a discord in there we've got plenty of videos on discord i'll pop a playlist at the top
of this video to check out.
But guys you're gonna have to start getting into the content creator mentality and outside of the streamer mentality right this is a big big big shift because once people start making this shift now you're setting yourself up for success or at least the best chance at success now like i said there's always the exception to the rules so if you don't do any of this and you do it your own way and you're like i'm only gonna stream and you blow up and you get ten thousand viewers a stream good for you i'm proud of you keep it up but for the majority of people that's not gonna be the case and although it's fun to think hey i'm going to be that one in a million outlier the reality is it usually is not the case for most of us.
We've got to start being more strategic so content creator in 2022 not just a streamer but you do need to incorporate streams into your content because that is going to be a massive massive massive thing especially moving into the future people want to come and interact with their favorite creators so your live stream is the best place to do that guys.
I hope this talk has been helpful for you and just kind of readjusting the way that we look at
content creation and streaming in general as a streamer on twitch i've realized that i can't just be focused on twitch and continue to find growth when the competition is just on another level but also it's really fun once you start building communities on a bunch of different platforms because people start to get to know one another and you also get to grow all the platforms at the same time so it really you know kind of diversifies your content if something
happens with one of your accounts it's not your whole entire lifeblood you know people put everything into just twitch streaming and if you get banned on twitch for some reason which you shouldn't but if you do what are you gonna do you don't have an audience anywhere else so it's actually a better play anyway to diversify your content and have multiple places that you are creating content.
I hope this has been helpful guys like i said if you like this video hit that thumbs up button for me and let me know and also of course to get it out to more people to help kind of start that process of adjusting people's opinions and thoughts about being a content creator versus just a streamer and of course if you want to see more videos like this hit the subscribe button and the notification bell to know when these things go live in addition to that you can find me like i said on twitch at twitch.tv slash eagle garrett we would love to have you over there anytime and of course in our discord at discord.glock we've got an awesome growing community over there and we would love to have you be a part in addition to that you can find me on all the socials although like i said twitter's the main one so if you really want to contact me or talk with me uh tweet at me or something like that because i'm pretty bad about tiktok and instagram i got to get better though but you can find all of this linked down
in the description of this video guys until the next video rock on peace out god bless thank you so much for watching!
