On Twitch, you can never log off

I think a more interesting story would be about the people that grind for years and years and never make it. You're left without a useful skill and no money, and probably a deficit on your mental health because you didn't go out and talk to people in real life for years. I think its not at all worth getting into as a career because making it big is like starting out as an actor, you have to know people. If you hit it big and are complaining about being burnt out, just walk away. Sorry that you pissed away your money and don't own a house, I guess? Could live pretty damn well on the money you made from it for a decade or more if you have self control, and have zero debt. Find something else to do in the mean time.

What other career can you make as much money, with such a low barrier to entry in skill and capital? Pretty much every other job requires just as much sacrifice of your time with nowhere near the same earning potential. Most of the big earners started streaming within the last 5 years[2], and even then, the top 2000 streamers are making 100k+[1]. I heard YouTube streaming is paying even better now.

1. https://twitch.pages.dev/en 2. https://twitchtracker.com/statistics/active-streamers

I treat my media creation as a business. Hours in and ROI are important, especially since I have a family and also try to keep their lives out of my online presence.

I looked at adding occasional Twitch livestreams to my output but quickly realized to make it return any kind of sustainable income, you have to practically "become a streamer".

There's no slow on-ramp like with YouTube, where you could start earning income after a few weeks/months of producing content and promoting it, growing an audience.

And then if you want to pause YouTube for a month or two, you don't lose the metrics that allow you to have an income.

It seems like Twitch is a grind, a lot more so than YouTube (where there's enough pressure, thank you very much!), and unless you're fully devoted to it, or are single and/or young with a lot of time to burn (and very mature about how you burn it), it's going to be very hard to maintain any kind of work life balance.

This whole thing is eurgh. Yes, this business is toxic for creators, but it's largely toxic for creators because it's monetizing a toxic product. Twitch is like a low cost off-ramp for having friends. The better, well adjusted version of twitch is that you log on to xbox, playstation or PC, hit up your friends and play some games and chat. That's the ideal. Then everything tumbles out from there, people without the time, social skills or inclination log on to twitch and form parasocial relationships instead. As a Twitch streamer that's the job you're doing. So it's not surprising when if you don't turn up, people tune out - they came to you because you aren't flakey like their real friends. You have to provide the social interaction and the dependability they need. If you're not doing that, you don't get paid.

Arguing about how Twitch streamers are treated is like arguing how Uber drivers are treated. The business is exploitative by nature, do you know how to not get exploited by Uber? Don't be an uber driver. There is no world in which Uber exists and Uber drivers aren't exploited. Similarly there is no world that exists in which Twitch streamers and viewers aren't exploited, because as a business it's only mode of operation is exploitation.

I watch a streamer (cooking) with a bunch of autoimmune diseases. She has a lot fewer people watching than anyone mentioned here (30-100, but a far higher percent than normal donate), but she’s also scared of taking days off, mainly because she knows it’s a job. It makes me sad when I see her stream while one of her diseases is flaring up, but unlike the rich streamers, they need the money.

Twitch has become a much lower risk more rewarding place for many creators who want to make "low effort" content in respect to edited/curated videos. Earlier this week a content creator with ~4,000-5,000 average concurrent viewers (~300th biggest by follow count) leaked his "bounty board" of advertisements he could show to his viewers, this included a $1195 "bounty" to watch a 1 minute trailer and a $7365 "bounty" to play the video game Genshin Impact for 1 hour. I find it a little wild an advertiser for a movie is willing to pay $1195/minute for 10,000 impressions (in a generous case). This is opposed to other models like youtube, where creators can make videos that wildly vary in viewership and advertisement payments. Subscriptions on twitch add another vector for streamers to make more consistent income, even when not streaming. This is likely a reason Twitch is the dominant streaming platform in America

Seems like a lot of streamers think that streaming = not working. By the time they realize streaming is a job, they're burnt out.

I respect the hell out of Ludwig for this. He treats streaming like a business, and his success speaks for itself. He doesn't foster parasocial relationships, and he avoids as much of the petty streamer drama that he possibly can. He's now transitioned towards large productions that draw in greater numbers of viewers. The huge streamers making six figures or more have more than enough money to hire personal trainers, therapists, and personal assistants to help manage their daily life. I feel very little sympathy for millionaires who commentate Youtube all day for a living for being incapable of managing their own lives like adults.

Every time I see articles talking about this subject, it's always completely focused on Twitch streamers that stream for a living. I would be more interested in hearing the contrast with streamers who stream for fun/not for a living. Which problems are the same between the two groups and which are unique?

Title: On Twitch, you can never log off.

Content: Here's some people who logged off Twitch.

Surprised this doesn't mention Asmongold. He just took months off from streaming and just came back like last week, and already just hit over 50,000 paid subscribers again. (In those months off he was streaming on his non-monetized alt channel where he doesn't feel any pressure with streaming and earns nothing.)

Streamers have to also be doing YouTube or creating alternate revenue streams because live streaming will inevitably burn you out. But you can take breaks...

Isn’t this the next level of burnout that YouTube creators have been complaining about and feeling for years?

And before that movie stars.

This is also true for the other 99% of full time streamers who average less than 300 viewers and make a bit more than a cashier at Chick-Fil-A. Most of them leave the industry after 4 years and have to find a new life for themselves with nothing to show from it.

I get that its an emotionally demanding job, and I get that the people who get to the top are likely to be the kind of people who will work themselves to death to stay there, but like, its not actually "competitive" when you're worried about making 2 million dollars a year instead of 15.

I didn’t read the whole article. However, there have been a few articles about successful Twitch streamers that have made millions. They have all said that there is a ton of pressure to stream on a regular basis. Very little sleep. So, I do believe there is pressure to stream all the time.

If you can make millions doing absolutely nothing and zero pressure, please tell everyone the secret. We would all appreciate the insight. Otherwise, a lot of us with common sense expect there to be some form of grind and sacrifice to make millions of dollars.

I think while this may not apply to a small minority of streamers (certainly only a tiny minority of successful ones), it can useful to think of most streamers as a form of sex workers. While not engaging in strictly sexual activity for money, their job is to perform (non-sexual) intimacy in order to foster parasocial relationships because this is how they get paid. This is more obvious with those typically disparaged as "boobie streamers" but it equally applies to men or more "modestly" clad women.

And above all, sex work is emotional labor. While for literal prostitutes the bare minimum can be entirely mechanical, even then it requires a certain level of performative (emotional) intimacy. The more abstract the sex work is (dancing, cam shows, financial domination, etc) this aspect remains the same and it is exhausting work that can take a serious toll. In a way it's more mentally exhausting than other forms of work because it requires a constant denial of one's self in order to perform as an abstract fantasy desired by those who pay for it.

I'd even go so far as to say that all service work (especially in US-style "the customer is always right" jobs that penalize employees for "not smiling enough") is part of this spectrum and in many cases even non-service work involves performing this role towards the owner of the company or upper management (after all, every company wants to hire prospects who are "enthusiastic about the product" or "fanatic about delivering user experience" or other nonsense claims that signify loyalty and submission).

This is also why so many streamers fail: if you want to be a gaming streamer or a politics streamer or a beauty streamer or whatever, fine, but being good at the thing (gaming, politics, makeup) isn't enough. The core skill you must build is engaging, building and handling an audience. This skill is absolutely transferrable (unlike, say, being really good at Counter Strike, unless you want to switch tracks to professional gaming) but it's far less well-understood and much harder to judge as an amateur. Some streamers seemingly just "luck into" popularity but they still end up having to either learn or hire someone to do "community management" and "moderation" and even then their popularity hinges on their ability to perform the character that made them popular and failing to evolve OR maintain that character can mean sudden death.

Technical note out of purely personal experience: platforms suck at managing subscriptions (ux-wise) when you’re a viewer, so I unsubscribe if there is no content for a while.

I don’t do this for websites. I have hundreds of bookmarks which I reorganize a couple of times a year and may visit when I have nothing to do. But I never had hundreds of e.g. youtube subscriptions, because youtube ui just sucks. I cannot categorize them. I cannot pin them down in the list that they bs_sort() randomly so you can’t find things. It’s basically useless and only serves as a pile.

And if you dare to subscribe-as-a-bookmark, it will pile up your feed as well.

No surprise then I keep it at 15 channels max and remove those that I have no reason to visit in just a week. I watch some of the top streamers / video makers occasionally without subscribing, because of that. I just remember them and watch when I remember to. But when you’re smaller than 0.01% it means you basically lost a viewer.

This doesn’t apply to twitch exactly, but still in the same category. I’ve visited it for a while and left because it sucks even more as a webapp.

I can't even log _in_ to begin with. I have an account but every password that I try doesn't work. Username retrieval emails work but password reset messages never arrive in my inbox. Support representatives ignore this issue when I tell them about it and instead say that they "can't verify [my] ownership of the account" and refuse to help even though I email them back from the address that's on my account. They also say that if I don't login that my username might maybe possibly hopefully someday be released for use after an indeterminate period of time.

On the flip side I suppose that this saves me from the plight described in this article, though I somehow doubt that anybody would want to watch me produce my cover band practice sessions or write random side projects anyhow :-P

Sips (of the Yogscast) is smaller compared to the today’s big names and he has no problem taking vacations or impromptu days off any time he needs to do something else.

And he always said that Twitch ended up working far better for him than YouTube ever did, since the income is more predictable, he doesn’t need to care about editing the videos or worry about demonetization.

Of course on the other end of the scale are people like Amouranth, who IIRC is not only the most watched female streamer, but also the one who streamed the most hours (at least in some given year).

So perhaps it depends whether one treats it as a job - good paying, but a normal job nonetheless - or as an opportunity to grind for a chance to earn tens of millions of dollars.

I have a few hundred thousand followers on tiktok, and was posting a video every day. It was hard to keep up and then I just stopped. Traffic dropped way off and hasn't recovered when I do post something.

Not being able to take a day off sounds horrible. Is it possible to pre-record and queue up videos or is it always live?

It seems like operating a channel shared between a few people might alleviate some of these concerns.

Always remember: fan is short for fanatic

Framing this like creators don't have a choice is a bad generalization and equally as bad as saying they have the power to do anything they want.

There's two situation that really highlight the uniqueness of the relationship between the audience and creators. One is the category of streamers that has been on the rise in the last few years, IRL streaming. The other is the concept of a sub-a-thon. I am surprised neither were brought up in the article.

For most people, being able to have a strong boundary between work and free time is necessary for the sake of mental health. My favorite content creator is an IRL streamer. She takes a camera out with her during the day and visits different destinations, usually spending a couple of weeks at locations. The amount of hours a streamer requires is pre determined by a contract with Twitch. There have been days where she leaves for the day at 4 pm and goes around places, like in a travel show, but essentially every minute is live streamed with an interactive chat. Some streamers talk to the entity that is chat like they would a friend, asking "am I going the right way?". The continued amount of time spent experiencing things together blur the line for whether it's actually parasocial. It's one thing when you hear a podcast and then imagine you are friends with a creator because you know a little about their history. It doesn't feel as one sided when the creator reads out and responds to your messages frequently, enough to where the creator remembers and requests for viewers by screen name.

This creator also has a discord and interacts there very frequently and has watch parties. There's channels to share food you ate or stream ideas. The creator engages with the discord like anyone else would, they also happen to be the content people make memes with. There's some validation they feel from their community, and the thing is most times the community responds to fishing for validation by being contrarian regardless of context. I enjoy this streamer's content because it feels like the way in which we process the world is similar. This understanding came from the creator being vulnerable with chat and opening up in a way you would a friend. Some creators do put on a persona, but some don't.

In that situation I don't know what it would mean to log off. I didn't understand initially, but it's clear that leans on their community strongly. The creator feels a sense of obligation to finish hours, but they seem to appreciate and enjoy their community and not feel pressured by it. This creator feels no guilt about delaying a stream or not follow her own schedule she has previously shared with chat. And I am glad, because I think it's a good way to be healthy around not having people build up expectations. A part of the interaction is still transactional, and with part of the twitch audience still maturing emotionally, donating or buying a monthly subscription to a creator can make people feel some ownership or entitlement.

When creators frame it as, only spend money on me if you have money to spend, and the money will not change how I see you, keep away building unhealthy dependencies. Not all creators can maintain that kind of distance, and sometimes there's nothing the creator creator can do.

Amourath, in the last week, received a gift of 70,000$ in cash along with some self defense tools and a prepaid bodyguard service. Unlike most similar stories, that's where the story ends. There were no conditions or strings attached to gift. I don't know how many people there are in the world that can drop 70,000$ on a person without it affecting their life. In this situation, I am not sure what the creator can do, it's not something she requested or wanted. She said she was grateful and hasn't contacted the person although they did leave a number, there was nothing dangerous about accepting the gift that would dox her. She wasn't even sure if she wanted to keep the gifts when she initially received it. The only reasonable expectation of Amourath is that she refuse gifts if she finds out it came at an unreasonable cost to the person who chose to gift.

The other thing is subathons and the apparent cause of burnout. Subathons are how they sound, a creator sets a time to extend their stream by for every new subscriber they get. Usually it's a few seconds. Ludwig, a very prolific creator ended up streaming for 30 days straight. He netted 1.4 million$, a large amount of which he donated or paid his team of moderators who worked to manage chat during the subathon. He even slept on stream, his moderators would make content for chat to engage with during that time.

Ludwig has spoken about how fondly he enjoyed doing it, he didn't really need the money and he potentially would have done it for longer if it wouldn't lead to negative consequences with friends and family. He is successful because he loves the work.

Content creation is often a lot of work for very little rewards, the people who end up successful are the one who would have done it for free. Burnout isn't necessarily about the platform itself. Any situation where a passionate person can obsess about their craft or where it can get repetitive can lead to burnout. The creator takes a break by making content or a company or doing work somewhere else. It very much depends on the person, and it can be argued that there isn't a great support system for content creators right now, but it's not a Twitch issue since most creators make their own schedule.

Twitch is absolutely is real work. Successful creators I've met usually end up apologizing if we spend more than a couple hours together saying, "sorry, it's hard to turn my brain off from thinking about new ideas".

Taking these things together with the facts in the article lead to a differnt final conclusion, to me.

Those poor millionaires :(

People realize they are wasting their time by watching people that are wasting their time right? right??