Why Streaming Isn’t a Sustainable Career (And How to Stream Sustainably)

Streaming Has its Downsides

Many hopeful creators want specifically to become streamers. Streaming is a ton of fun and a great way to connect with your community, but it is extremely unsustainable if your goal is to turn your creativity into a career. We’ll discuss why that is and what you should consider instead to make streaming more sustainable.

Poor Discoverability

Everyone complains about poor discoverability on Twitch. In fact, YouTuber Drew Gooden recently did an experiment following top streaming advice (from Ninja’s Master Class) and after weeks of dedication, only gained one follower. Of course, don’t pursue streaming as a career if you only care about money and fame, but if you want to make streaming a career, you won’t grow on Twitch discoverability alone.

Why would someone watch you over someone much larger who they already know and like? It’s because they don’t know you or your content, since Twitch (and streaming in general) is not the place to be found. It’s the place for your audience to get to know you after you’ve been found somewhere else.

Monetization is almost entirely donations

As much as we hate ads, they’re far more sustainable to fund creative works than donations. With donations, you’re only able to earn money while you’re live, and in many cases, your audience is unable to donate. This is all to say that exclusively relying on donations is unsustainable (especially when Twitch takes such a large cut).

To further emphasize this point, many Twitch streamers are losing a lot of revenue due to inflation and the probable recession we’re in—Twitch subscriptions are likely one of the first expenses people will cut if money is tight. YouTube ad revenue is also down, but it isn’t reliant on donations, and once your video is made, it’s available 24/7!

This need for donations on Twitch often leads streamers to many toxic, unsustainable habits, such as streaming for obscene lengths in the hope of earning enough donations to pay the bills.

Extremely long hours, low pay

Only a small fraction of the top 1% of streamers earn minimum wage from Twitch alone. Many streamers believe they need to continually stream, racking more and more hours into their Twitch grind to be monetarily successful on the platform, as you are more or less only making money while you are live.

This is one of the main causes of burnout among streamers—you can’t always be available for your audience. This myth is perpetuated by streamers who are extremely successful and are live all the time, such as HasanAbi or Asmongold. In addition, streamers at this size are absolutely publishing content across multiple platforms to accelerate their growth, and they likely completely outsource their other platforms to editors and managers. To top it all off, Twitch has an even greater problem that the most popular streamers are the ones who get promoted, so the rich get richer, leaving most streamers undiscovered.

On Twitch, you are only making money if you’re live. To be sustainable, your content needs to work for you long after you’ve worked on it (and you need to take care of yourself too).

Instead, Be a Creator

While I seem to be against streaming, this simply isn’t the case! My objective is to share that streaming should be a component of a greater creative strategy if your goal is to make content creation your career.

Streaming is an amazing way to connect with the community you have as well as one of the best sources for content optimization.

Use The Community Aspect of Streams

Replying to comments on YouTube, engaging with your audience on Twitter, and other asynchronous communication are great for helping your audience connect with you. However, the absolute best way to grow that connection is live engaging while streaming.

Do things you can’t do in pre-recorded formats and develop that connection!

• Talk with your audience
• Take suggestions for future content
• Answer questions they may have
• Try challenges that involve community or are unique to streaming
  • Crowd control is an amazing utility, which allows your audience to donate and immediately cause a change in your game

This is a short list, but it should get you started—streaming is arguably the best way to connect with your community, and there’s so much unique to streaming to make the most of! These unique aspects can also lead to great content for you to optimize.

Optimize Your Content

Consider your streams as the first step in your content optimization pipeline, but consider every other step the most important pieces.

Content optimization is making the most out of every piece of content you make across multiple platforms and media. One good idea can become not just a stream, but a video, several TikToks or shorts, a blog post, a Twitter thread, and more. Furthermore, you can share the same content across multiple platforms, like YouTube videos on Facebook, TikToks to YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels, and blog posts into Twitter threads.

The process of content optimization is crucial for saving you time while building a multi-faceted, multi-platform presence online—it’s a lot faster to make modifications to one idea for each platform than to silo ideas across platforms and need to start from scratch every time.

Here’s an example (and extremely common) content optimization workflow many streamers employ to extreme success:

1. Brainstorm unique stream ideas with the idea that the concept will become a video.
   • Develop some sort of narrative cohesion, like a unique challenge or premise.
     
2. Stream your content.
   • If applicable, use the StreamDeck timestamp plugin or Twitch clips to find the most highlightable moments
     
3. For YouTube or longer-form videos, potentially add edited intros and “chapter” segments to add structure and clarify your narrative or premise.
   
4. Decide on your best clips to share to Twitter, TikTok, and other short-form platforms if applicable
   • These clips should focus on helping promote your video, but they must also be able to stand alone!
     
5. Short form content mainly promotes your long-form content, and your long-form content helps promote your stream.
   • Most of your revenue will come from long-form YouTube content derived from your stream, but your creative focus is till your stream itself
     
6. The cycle continues, and all your content works together to help you grow!

We’ll have a post specifically on content optimization relatively soon to delve more into this subject, as many folks don’t realize how much planning and optimizing improves your creative results!

Plan streams with the intention of making them into other more discoverable content. Structure a stream to become a video, as well as optimizing for highlightable moments for clips, Twitter, and TikTok (plus Shorts and/or Reels)!

Many of the most successful streamers do this exact process of spending more time planning streams to optimize the content across platforms. Some examples below:

• Ludwig—his stream is planned to typically have ideas that can become multiple videos. Not every segment makes the cut, but through outsourcing editing he can completely focus on streaming, which is likely what he enjoys most.
  
• Atrioc—he has a macro-weekly structure, with things like Marketing Monday. Repetitive structure helps make planning even easier, and it utilizes his own expertise in marketing for interesting, optimizable content.
  
• PointCrow—he does many unique challenges across many games, namely the Zelda franchise. These challenges almost always have a unique, engaging premise with clear editing to present the narrative, which ends up being extremely clickable for YouTube, which is his largest audience despite Twitch being his personal focus.
  
• girl_dm_—she utilizes her unique premise as a V-Tuber and great comedic skills to primarily focus on making her stream as highlightable as possible. These highlights have exploded on TikTok, leading to extremely rapid growth on her channels across platforms.

Content optimization lets you still enjoy streaming while hedging the unsustainable downsides of focusing on streaming as your creative career. You’ll grow faster, likely earn more revenue, and grow the community you stream for much more quickly than from streaming alone.

Streaming isn’t the Only Thing

Streaming is fun, but unless you’re the top fraction of the top percent of streamers, streaming alone cannot be your career. It simply isn’t sustainable without additional ways to increase monetization, such as brand deals or creating on multiple platforms.

Poor discoverability leads to slow growth. Monetization relies on donations while live, which will be slow if you’re growing slowly. This leads to long hours with little to no pay for the vast majority of streamers.

The most successful streamers use their streams as the SOURCE of content for other platforms. Plan ahead so your stream can turn into cohesive videos! When you stream, make the most of what can only be done live. Optimize your content, and use the strengths of other platforms to help promote it all.

If your goal is only to stream for fun, don’t worry about this at all! However, turning your creative endeavors into a career takes treating it like a business, and changing the way you stream will absolutely help with that.

Best of luck, and happy creating.