Another 3 months have been and gone. Here’s my summary of my Twitch activity, and any reflections or observations that come to mind.
One of things that is becoming all too apparent is that streaming just once a week is probably not often enough to grow at a decent rate. Yes, I’m feeling that my growth rate is rather slow, but then I only stream once a week, and for only 2 hours, so what do I expect?
My Twitch Q1 2022 stats
| Month | Average viewers | New followers | Subscriptions | Revenue | Time streamed | Hourly rate |
| October 2021 | 2.2 | 105 | 0 | 0 | 6:15:00 | N/A |
| November 2021 | 5 | 62 | 4 | 10.94 | 11:20:00 | $0.97 |
| December 2021 | 4.2 | 16 | 3 | 11.54 | 11:42:00 | $0.99 |
| January 2022 | 6.8 | 37 | 4 | 12.98 | 9:58:00 | $1.30 |
| February 2022 | 9.5 | 34 | 4 | 10.55 | 9:17:00 | $1.14 |
| March 2022 | 5.7 | 20 | 5 | 17.18 | 8:57:00 | $1.92 |
As a new metric, I decided to add a column to divide the revenue by the number of hours streamed, to produce an hourly rate. Note to self: don’t go giving up the day job!
A key factor to growth on Twitch
Networking with others is absolutely key. The amount of time you spend hanging out in other people’s streams and chatting to make friends, has a real impact on your follower count. Especially if you can make friends as a viewer, and then later raid those channels, you’re sure to get a heartfelt and genuine shoutout.
Other things I’m noticing
Not sure if this is a genuine pattern or not, but I *think* that I’m seeing more clicks on go-live notifications when the notification text is something direct like “Click to join me!”. That would make sense, but I need more data to confirm if it’s true. (Leave a comment if you feel this is a true thing).
So far, I’ve been lucky enough to be on the receiving end of people who buy gift subs, in a few of the channels I enjoy watching.
Confession: I have never spent a single penny of my own money on Twitch, to either buy Bits or to subscribe to anyone’s channels.
I’m starting to wonder if there’s a culture of reciprocal subbing to other streamers, who then favour each other for raids etc. If so, it’s an unwritten and unspoken thing.
Personally, given the proportion of revenue that Twitch retain from every sub, I’m not interested in effectively paying Twitch through tit-for-tat subs. The only winner is Twitch, and streamers are just suckers for falling into the trap. Too cynical?
Maybe this could be the subject of an experiment in the future.
I usually stream on a Monday evening, but I did an additional afternoon stream, and it was a refreshing experience because a) I felt a bit more energetic than I do in the evenings, and b) it attracted a few more first time viewers (and followers) who would not usually catch my evening slot.
I took part in a raid train event! This was good fun and exposed my channel to a few more people. I was on very early in the sequence however, so I think the main benefits are for those who appear later. Still, I’d do another one as it was nice to make friends with a few of the other streamers involved.
Discord – I’m still feeling a bit lost with this. Maybe it only becomes useful once you’ve got a certain number of engaged followers. It mostly feels like a lot of social media – posting for the sake of posting something. I mean, seriously, how many new Twitch followers do you think you’ve ever gained from those clips you post to Tik Tok, or Instagram?
Other distractions
I got myself a new looper – the brand new Boss RC 600 loopstation.
I’ve now got in excess of 100 songs on my songlist and have noticed that as I’m playing more, I’m becoming more confident (or less fussy) about adding songs that I might feel are a bit rougher around the edges. It’s good to push oneself slightly beyond familar comfort zones.
You can find my songlist here
That’s it for another quarter! Take care out there.
Leave a Reply