My average viewers right now is 33, but if you look at the month before, my average was 8. And honestly, my real average is much higher than that, because when I look across the stream I'm working with something like 40, 50, even 60 viewers at a time. Call it 40 to 50 average viewers. Two very simple things got me here.
I've been streaming online a long time. There's a week off right in the middle of my data here, because a little hurricane came through and I took the week off. That's a key data point to notice. Before that week, everything was very consistent, an average of about 8 viewers on my stream. Then I made two changes that took us almost instantly from 8 viewers up over 40 average viewers. I'm going to walk you through exactly what I did, including the game I'm playing and how I'm doing it.
I've streamed for years off and on Twitch, and years on other platforms too. In my experience Twitch is by far the best platform to have your audience on. It can also be very challenging to grow your viewership. I streamed all different games at all different times of day and stayed stuck around an average of 8 viewers. And then, literally, two simple changes moved me way up.
Change One: Play Gods Unchained
The first main change I made was the game. I've played hundreds of different games on Twitch over the last two years, and the number one game in terms of getting me new viewers and new followers, by far, is Gods Unchained. It has brought in more new followers than any other game, way more. I've played some games for hours and hours, grinding away, and not gotten even one new follower. With Gods Unchained it was different. When I first played it I only had one or two viewers because I was multistreaming, and even with one or two viewers I was still picking up new followers. I had the most average viewers I'd had on my Twitch channel in forever. So the number one change I made was simply to play Gods Unchained.
Now, that's what works for me. I love card games. I'll run Gods Unchained in the background so you can see exactly what the game looks like. What's really cool about it is that it's a customizable card game, like Magic: The Gathering or Hearthstone. The big difference is that it has NFTs and lives on the blockchain. It's on Immutable X, which is a layer 2 on Ethereum. That makes it way more exciting than something like Magic, because it offers true ownership of the cards. You can open packs and pull something worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars out of a free pack. That's why this game is so cool. It's fun, and it's much faster and easier to learn than Magic, because it was designed that way. It's a game that's very in tune with where we're at right now.
Change Two: Give Away Gods
As soon as I changed the game I was playing, my viewers almost immediately doubled. I played a bunch of other games and hardly got any new followers, some, but compared to Gods Unchained, almost nothing. So the game obviously makes a big difference.
The second thing I changed is that I started giving away money on Gods Unchained. What better way to get people to watch than to give away money? And it goes really well with this game, because Gods Unchained makes it super easy to give money away. You can think of it like a watch-to-earn program. Gods Unchained itself has a play-to-earn program where I'm earning something like 4 or 5 Gods a day just to play. Gods is currently around 30 or 40 cents each, so if you do the math I'm getting a couple of bucks a day in play-to-earn just for playing, which is really cool. I'm essentially doing the same kind of thing with my Twitch channel. I started giving away 10 Gods every time I win. If the price of Gods pumps up to a dollar, maybe I'll drop it to 5 Gods, but I've committed to giving away at least 10,000 Gods over the next three months.
When you put both of those together, the game I'm playing is a game with a great community, and on top of that I'm giving away Gods. That combination helps me build a really strong foundation on my channel.
Why Twitch Beats Algorithm-Driven Platforms
Someone in chat pointed out that viewers won't really follow you to other games, and of course there's some truth to that. Some viewers certainly won't follow me onto other games. But some will. The beauty of using Twitch compared to other live streaming platforms is that on Twitch you can move your viewers to a different game much more easily than you can somewhere else like Facebook or YouTube. Anywhere you have to work through an algorithm, it's much harder to change games.
For example, when I was on Facebook gaming I was consistently frustrated, because the algorithm would not let me change games. I basically had to play Call of Duty: Warzone. There were some exceptions, like Goldeneye, which actually did well in the algorithm, but other than that the algorithm would just punish me if I tried to play something different. On Twitch there is no algorithm.
I did a poll on my channel, and if I switched away from Gods Unchained, about 40% of the people watching said they'd watch the different game. Here's what has consistently worked for other streamers: you build up your audience on one particular game, on a platform that doesn't put an algorithm between you and your followers. So I build my audience playing Gods Unchained on Twitch. Then, even if I play a different game and only 40% of people come across, I'm still going to have a lot more people watching than if I'd just kept grinding the same old game over and over. From the Gods Unchained community, even when I want to switch games, I have the flexibility to do that and some people will still come watch.
I follow lots of other people too. If I mainly watch you play Gods Unchained and you're playing something else, I might not choose to tune in that day, and that's fine. What's nice is that on Twitch I have the flexibility to play a different game and some people will still come watch. Whereas if you're on a platform with an algorithm between you and your audience, you get stuck playing one certain game, and you get absolutely punished if you try to switch. That's why on Twitch it makes such a huge difference to get that initial community up.
Is Full-Time Streaming Worth It?
Some of you ask whether it's good to be a full-time streamer. I am a full-time streamer. This is my life professionally, this is what I do. But it does not currently pay very much on its own. There is huge income potential, though. The problem with being a full-time streamer, especially if you're only streaming on Twitch, which in my experience you should not do, is that your earnings are often based on how many people are watching and how much those people have to give. People who just started following usually won't give that much either. Give it a bit of time and there tends to be enough money in it, but it takes patience.
Here's what works better for me. I stream on Twitch, and then I take clips of my live stream using my Stream Deck. This very clip I'm making right now, I started my stream, took a few screenshots, recorded it, and then I upload it to YouTube and put it on my podcast. That's how I'm able to make a full-time living, by being a Twitch streamer, a YouTuber, and a podcaster all combined, because all three work well together. Growing the community on Twitch with Gods Unchained brings in new followers. Some of those followers give directly on Twitch, some go watch on YouTube, some listen on the podcast. The YouTube videos earn ad revenue, and sometimes they bring people back over to Twitch. Same thing with the podcast. It's a system that combines live interaction with evergreen content.
So if you want to be a full-time streamer, the only place I see as viable to stream for the long term is Twitch. Then you put clips out on YouTube and on a podcast if you want, or you can do shorts, and you just keep doing that over and over. Initially you're not usually going to make hardly anything, and you'll probably spend more than you make. But if you love what you do and you can afford to go a while without making money, there's plenty of full-time income potential in streaming. If you want to go deeper on the mindset and mechanics behind all of this, I've collected a lot of it in my YouTube Coaching playlist, and you can watch my YouTube Coaching playlist to see how I approach it.
I've seen so many people talk about what to do to grow on Twitch, and this is literally the easiest thing I've ever come across: play Gods Unchained and give away Gods to the people who are watching. It's really that simple. I went from about 8 viewers to 33 viewers within a couple of weeks, which is very unusual on Twitch. I really appreciate everyone here to watch. I intend to play Gods Unchained indefinitely, and occasionally I'll play a different game and see how many of you want to watch. Thank you for being here, and let's play some more Gods Unchained, win a game, and give some Gods away.