Twitch - January Report

Hi guys!

I decided that this year I want to make a monthly blog post about streaming, it will focus mainly on what I am doing every month, the things that worked and what didn't along with future plans. In the posts you'll also see the same monthly statistics that I see to give you guys more information.

But before all that, let's begin with a bit of background

Background about the streamer

Since I am writing this as a sort of reference/guide for myself it's important to share where I was at the start of the year, so that we can establish a sort of safe baseline to see how growth occurs with certain games and experiments. It's no use to say " I averaged 15 viewers in January, massive growth" when we don't know what I was getting before.

Firstly, I am a Twitch Partner, I write this not to brag but to add some legitimacy to this post. A lot of "how to guides" are written by people who streamed for a week and have 2 average viewers.

Secondly, despite being a Twitch Partner, I am a small streamer, I averaged 11 viewers on November and 8 in December with about 40 new follows in those 2 months. I have a handful of really dedicated friends who are regulars on my channel, they account for most of my viewers last year and I am intensely grateful to them.

Now you know what my streaming situation is, Partner, handful of regulars, minuscule growth. So let's talk about every month of 2018 in detail shall we?

January

(Cuphead, Okami, Evil Within)

When this year started I felt a lot more driven to invest more into Twitch, I felt like I had slowed down a bit after becoming partner. Many people aim to be a Twitch partner and when I achieved that (sorta by accident by the way) I just started to....phone it in a bit. That definitely took a toll on my creativity because in my head I was thinking " I'm a partner, why the hell do I need to put in more effort?" I had thought that by simply being partner eventually all the billions of viewers and millions of dollars would come.

I was wrong.

Turns out that being a successful streamer doesn't end at being a Twitch partner, it's simply a rung on the ladder you have to climb to get to the top, and sometimes being partner is a very low rung.

Unfortunately I can't say I did much new in January, I wanted to but I just didn't know what to do or how to approach anything, so in the end I just did more of the same and that resulted in one of the worst Twitch months for me.

The only gimmick I tried in January was to add a "word of the day" to my title. Shortened to WOTD, everyday I would have a rarely used word to my title, words such as Nefarious, Sporadic and such. WOTD didn't generate much buzz but a couple of viewers mentioned that it helped them learn new english words (shockingly not everyone is a native english speaker) and a friend reminded me to change the WOTD when I forgot. Overall it was a positive thing to add but it didn't really change much.

But let's move on to more factual information.

Let's talk numbers!

A little Information should be added here, firstly total unique views is a bit misleading since I believe it is bugged to not count some viewers, I could be very wrong here though. Either way Socialblade says that for January I had 887 views, slightly higher but not a major deal (for January).

The games I played had a pretty obvious role in my views (though the differences were not extreme). I started with Cuphead for the start of the year and the average viewer was at 10-12, I then switched to Okami for around a week and got around 7-9 viewers, I then swapped out for Evil Within and saw healthy growth of 10-13 viewers per stream.

This leads me back to my original assumption that for a variety streamer, it's almost always best to stream NOT popular games. Cuphead was a major hit when it came out due to it's art and difficulty, it brought many big streamers who raged and caused highlights on youtube.

Growing a channel using Cuphead even 2 months after it's release was not great, there were still plenty of streamers out there playing it in January.

Okami was an even worse experience, it was released in the middle of December and playing it in January just meant I was 1 out of 200 streamers playing it. I also didn't really enjoy the game nor do anything interesting. Okami definitely hasn't aged as well as some games, with somewhat sloppy controls and no real challenge. It's still an amazingly artistic game but sadly it never appealed to me and that showed on stream.

Evil Within was the last game that I streamed in January and it easily was the best. A horror game with a good mix of action and crafting along with a solid story meant that there was a lot to like as both a streamer and a viewer. I also had much less competition since the game came out late 2014, meaning it's been done by all big streamers and very few people still streamed it.

Overall January was a bad start to the year, I finished Cuphead but didn't benefit much from it (viewerwise) I quit Okami a week in due to not enjoying it or growing from it. I did pick up a little in the end due to Evil Within but I as a streamer hadn't done anything unique or special for that growth to occur.

Still, while January was bad, I did try out new things with great success in February.

Favorite Highlight

Here's my favorite moment from streaming in January, beating the final boss in Cuphead after about an hour of grinding (Casino boss was much harder).