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Mindset = Everything

4/12/2015

7 Comments

 
If there’s one life lesson streaming should teach you, it’s the value of patience. Growth of a stream is not something that’s going to happen overnight, or in a week, or in a month. I see so many streamers get into streaming expecting people to show up on Day 1, and their stream to blow up instantly. They’ll stream for a week or two with huge excitement, but when they see little to no growth, they give up and stop streaming. They start to look for reasons on what went wrong, and give up on the dream of growing their stream. Today, I want to talk to you about how important it is to have the right mindset and why good things come to those who wait.

Comparing Yourself to Others

Another major problem that I see streamers do often is to compare their streams to others. “Streamer X gets way more viewers than me and he plays the same exact game, it’s not fair.” Stop. This is the wrong mindset to have when you get into streaming. Yes, we all want growth for our streams, but questioning and complaining why someone gets more views than you is the wrong way to go about it! Not only does this not improve your stream or attract viewers in any way, it worsens your stream and pushes viewers away.

This isn’t just a problem with streams that are small, this happens at all levels of streaming. I sometimes feel like people forget why they got into streaming. Streaming is about fun and enjoying a game with a group of people. Sure everyone wants to grow, but complaining will never get you anywhere. If you feel like others are gaining growth faster than you, find out why! Are they better at certain aspects of streaming than you? Are they more engaging as a streamer? Streaming is a constant learning process. I love going into streams and learning from them. 

I remember when I was perusing streams on the Front Page and I stumbled upon Brotatoe’s stream (twitch.tv/brotatoe.) At the time, I was using a really bad microphone for my stream and the sound quality was not up to par. When I came into Brotatoe’s stream, his microphone quality was amazing. It made me stay around and check out his stream. Within hours I made the decision to upgrade my microphone set up and improve my stream. When you go into new streams for the first time, go in with the mindset that you can learn something, not “WHY DOES THIS STREAMER GET MORE VIEWERS THAN ME!”

The Viewer Count Problem

Let’s be honest, that little number that pops up under your stream when you go live can be really distracting. Never seeing it go up can be super disheartening, and it’s even worse when you notice it go down. I’m going to give some sound advice if you’re just starting out. Don’t look at that number! You can go back and check after the stream how your numbers were, but initially don’t worry about that number. There are many factors that cause that number to go up and down are many, and a lot of them have nothing to do with what you’re doing on stream. You’ve got a lot of things to focus on when you’re streaming and knowing how many people that watch your stream is only going to distract you from what you should be focusing on: creating a stream that people want to watch.

As your stream grows, I think taking a peek at the number every now then is definitely OK.  Just be careful to not get obsessive over that number. I’ve definitely had my days streaming where I stressed about why X game was not generating X amount of viewers, to the point where I stopped streaming. Don’t do this! If you’re stressing about your stream, there’s a good chance your viewers will able to notice. If you’re having fun and focusing on the cast, your viewers will too.

Just Keep Streaming!

My main advice to those who are upset about their stream growth is this: Just stream. It’s that easy. You need to look at every time you stream as an opportunity to get better. You can read every article on the internet and watch every how-to video about streaming, but until you do it more and more, you won’t make much progress.  Every time you push that broadcast button, you’re creating an opportunity for someone to find your stream and love every minute of being there. The more time you put into streaming, the more you’re going to get out of it. It won’t be easy and it won’t happen overnight, but if you’re patient, success will come.

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7 Comments
Anonymous
4/12/2015 07:51:23 am

I find that personally when I go into a stream and see/hear something that I don't like I simply leave without saying anything. Is there any way to encourage people to just come right out and tell me what I'm doing wrong? I'd rather have my feelings hurt but also have an opportunity to fix a problem than stagnate while feeling good about myself.

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CloakedYoshi link
4/12/2015 01:56:42 pm

Trying not to compare yourself to others is huge, like you said it happens at all levels. For people who still struggle with this, if you are comparing yourself to someone else who is better off then you, remember there are people worse off then you aswell! Its very easy to just see someone who's stream is going well at the time and think, I deserve this more or something, but what your not seeing is all the people who are worse off! This is good life advice too, not just for streams.

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Cartina
4/12/2015 02:10:55 pm

I'm sorry, but you are not gonna get random people that pop into your stream to start giving you a whole bunch of feedback on your stream. Mostly because they are not invested in it, simply leaving it is a lot less work for them.

Besides, there can be 20 possible reasons they can't stick around and 10 of them might be unfixable from your side. I even once had a guy that left the brilliant feedback that I should change my accent. If you truly want some feedback you can incorporate it into the stream "Hey, I just changed audio a bit, tell me if it doesn't sound good". But from my own experience, you aren't gonna please everyone and trying to accommodate every persons pet peeve about your stream is only going to leave you stressed out.

Do the best stream you can do, because in the end that's what you want people to watch and if they don't like that, there is not much you can do. In the end you are still going to get viewers that like what you do and when you do, your regulars will let you know if something is wrong.

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Cayleo
4/17/2015 09:00:32 am

Just to expand on what CloakedYoshi said. Sometimes there's a matter of perspective involved as well. That almighty streamer who's "better than you" could be having a good day. The viewer count can often give a false representation of their actual fan base. Maybe they got raided, or hosted, or maybe everyone else got eaten by zombies that day and there's no one else to watch... There could be many reasons that could make it seem like they're doing much better than you. Who knows, maybe someone will raid your stream one day...

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Azorial link
4/19/2015 05:19:45 pm

Hey there! I loved this post. I tend to get those viewers who lurk a bit but I tend to greet them anyway. Having a nice personality works as well. ^_^

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Bismuth
4/26/2015 03:38:10 am

Not worrying about my viewer count was huge in 2014. At that point, I had been streaming (with some breaks) for over 2 years, I had done hundreds of streams of Turok 2, Minecraft, SM64, DK64, etc. and I also was streaming almost everyday for multiple hours, as a world record holder in DK64. I had done the AGDQ2014 Minecraft speedrun in front of 110k viewers. That doubled my follower count and made the reason people recognize me to be that run 80% of the time.

However, even with all of that, I never reached 30 viewers while streaming without a raid, and even when I was being raided, the viewer count would drop within 2 minutes back to 20 and under. This eventually grew out of my patience and I started caring a lot about it and be very discouraged about it.

It was a rather big part of why I quit speedrunning and streaming. I was not having as much fun with the game and I was getting tired of streaming to nobody. It had been 2 years of dedication and I was looking at new runners with worse times and a young channel get a lot more viewers and a lot more members from the community watching and getting involved. In my case, most people in my own community never actually bothered to watch my stream even when I held the WR in a category.

In the end, I'm still unsure why this happened. At first, I assumed it was because I was streaming a rather obscure game (Turok 2). Then, I assumed it was because I was streaming a game that's rarely associated with speedrunning (Minecraft). Then, I thought it was because I was bad at the game I was running (SM64). Finally, I guess it was because I was not running the most popular category (DK64). I just thought that somewhere along the way, I'd pick up friends, regulars that drop by my stream and enjoy no matter what I'm doing, some kind of following at least. Not even getting respect and attention from a lot of members of my own community while I was streaming WR runs was definitely disheartening, and in the end it made my attitude towards streaming a lot more sour. I could see my mood while streaming deteriorate, and I was getting a lot more frustrated with the game a lot more easily. Eventually, I simply quit because I was not enjoying it anymore.

TL;DR: I feel like I applied your advice for over 2 years, and then I couldn't be patient about it anymore and gave up.

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Jayeldeee
5/2/2015 10:54:29 am

I think one thing that people forget is to just have fun with streaming. Whether you have 10 viewers or 1,000 viewers at one time, if you're not having fun, then viewer count doesn't really even matter. It becomes more of a chore in this instance. Yes, it's cool to have many people to talk to, but what was the reason you started streaming? Was it to have fun? Or was it to have glory? I think someone who streams needs to evaluate this when they're streaming. I for one stream games that I know people could care less about. But I don't really care about that because I have fun playing the games I do. And if people want to watch, they are very welcome! And of course I'll do my best to talk to them and provide at least a somewhat good quality stream with what I have.

And plus, if I'm not playing games with my sister right next to her, then it's fun when she comes in because it's like we're spending time together, and nothing beats having one of my best friends there <3 :)

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