Being a Big Streamer SUCKS

My friends, I have something for you today that will shock many of you who are trying to be big streamers on Twitch or Facebook or YouTube. I'm Jerry Banfield, and this is what I do. I'm a streamer full time. I streamed this live on Twitch and then uploaded it to YouTube. If you have dreams of being a big streamer and how awesome it is, I'm going to try and destroy those for you right now, because I've been a big streamer on Facebook and on YouTube, and I can tell you, it sucks. It sucks really bad. The numbers back this up: 18 million minutes viewed, 13 million three-second views. That's big streamer stuff. On YouTube, 31 million views. I've had streams get as many as 700,000 views after going live, a bunch of live streams with 10,000-plus views, and as many as 2,500 people watching concurrently. And you know what I enjoy a lot more? Being a small streamer is awesome. I'm going to tell you some of the worst parts of being a big streamer, which I shared live on Twitch with my beautiful small community. If you are hoping to be a big streamer one day, you're going to want to take in every single word of this, because it will totally change how you look at the destination you're dreaming of.

I Dreamed of Being a Big Streamer — and Got Exactly What I Wanted

I dreamed of being a big streamer, and I got exactly what I wanted. Those analytics are from just one single year on Facebook. There were other years that had not quite this many, but I've got over 27 million views on Facebook, and 2021 was my biggest year — probably bigger than a lot of your biggest years as a streamer. You're thinking, okay, Jerry, I'm having a hard time even believing you. How much money did you make that year? Well, I made over $100,000 during 2021. Facebook paid me directly over $70,000, and I got more than $30,000 from other sources, mostly related to streaming — things like sponsorships, direct tips, et cetera.

So you're looking at me right now, and you're thinking, what sucks about making $100,000 in one year playing video games three hours a day on Facebook? What sucks about that? You might be having a hard time imagining that, because you're thinking: lots of money, awesome. Lots of people watching, awesome. Great big reputation, people know my name, awesome. You're thinking how great that is, but there's one part you don't understand about this: the human psyche. You probably do understand it, but you're not thinking of it in this context, and I'm going to enlighten you right now. The human mind tends to over-emphasize and focus on negativity while under-emphasizing positivity. This is why one horrific news story gets everybody talking, while a million acts of kindness don't ever make the news and go unnoticed.

The Thing You Love Most Gets Destroyed

Now look at streaming this way. The worst part that sucks about being a big streamer is that often what you love the most about your live stream — how much fun it is playing video games, talking with people, and just that community connection you've got — actually gets destroyed when you're a big streamer. Instead, I felt very isolated. At the points where I was getting the most views, I often felt the most isolated, because my chat would go so fast that the people who really loved my stream couldn't even keep up with it, and I couldn't even see their chat.

And as a big streamer, there are so many negative, unexpected things that happen that often you don't even want to talk about. Some streamers have done things on the down low — dark, negative, nasty things — in order to become a big streamer. Now, me personally, I go to Alcoholics Anonymous every day. I'm sober eight years. A big part of me working and living my steps is a life of complete honesty and transparency, so that one didn't affect me personally. But a lot of streamers do things like cheat at Warzone, or pay a whole bunch of money for coaching from another big streamer — and that's how they get to co-stream with that streamer all the time, who then promotes them a lot. And if they piss that streamer off, they're looking at getting destroyed. They do things like spend a huge amount of money on ads to pump their stream up, and then they're running out of money. A lot of them, they sell their soul to the devil. I'm serious about that. You can do that if you really want to be a big streamer.

A lot of times, streamers have done things to compromise their own integrity, and then the one thing they really need to say on stream to come clean is the one thing they can't say. For example, they can't just come out and say, "Hey guys, I'm cheating at Warzone right now," just to clear their own conscience and feel better about themselves. The one thing that's most interesting and relevant, the thing they need to say, they can't say. So I'm grateful I personally didn't struggle with that.

Constant Nastiness Every Single Day

But I struggled with something else. If you're the kind of streamer who's willing to cheat at Warzone and keep it secret, you probably wouldn't struggle as much with what I'm about to share. What I hated about being a big streamer is the constant nasty comments every single day, from so many people. I have never had that much negativity and nastiness directed at me in my entire life as I did in my last two years on Facebook Gaming, which is one big reason I left Facebook Gaming. The platform as a whole fuels drama. It's a drama-based platform — like, let's have some drama, and we'll push your drama out. You put out 50 posts that are nice and helpful and kind, and you put one drama post out, and the platform will send that one out to everybody. And then everybody's thinking of you based on that one post and not the other 50 you put out.

I have never faced so much nastiness and negativity in my entire life — and I was a correction officer. I was a police officer. When you pulled somebody over, they might be a little bit rude sometimes, or they might take a swing at you on the way to jail. Being a big streamer, there were days sometimes where people said thousands of nasty things in a single stream. Now, if you are really armored up, and you don't care about them at all, and you just want that money and those views, then you're probably going to get lured into the cheating angle, the dark do-whatever-it-takes mindset, and "screw the haters — in fact, it's funny, all these people hating." But maybe it gets to you, too. For me, when you're being transparent and loving and open and honest, it's brutal for your mental health to take all those assaults. And I saw other streamers, at the height of their success, complaining about their mental health.

Sometimes a streamer would think it was specific to them. For example, you'd have a pretty girl streaming, and she'd think, it's just because I'm a hot girl and I get all these dudes. No — whoever you are, you will get ripped to pieces by people just looking for attention. If you're a beautiful girl, you'll attract lots of the lonely dudes who want to just talk about your body and your looks. And God forbid you get a boyfriend or a girlfriend and aren't single anymore — then they'll all stop coming around. Being a big streamer, there are so many ways your feelings get hurt.

Feeling Like a Fraud at the Top

And then you really feel like you're kind of a fraud. When I stepped up on Facebook Gaming, from my view, I had everything all these people watching me wanted. And yet there were so many days I did my live stream and I felt drained, I felt annoyed and irritated, I felt glad to turn the live stream off. I felt like I didn't do any good. Even though people gave me hundreds of dollars and tons of attention, there were lots of days where I would have rather worked a regular job — just driven a trash truck and dumped trash cans and listened to an audiobook and relaxed. You think being a big streamer is so great in your mind, because you're just thinking money and power and respect. But to me, those things are very unsatisfying. Yeah, the first time I made $700 in one stream, the first time I did a live stream that made thousands of dollars in ad revenue in just an hour or two of work — yeah, that was pretty cool. But it's nothing compared to all the nastiness.

The Psychos You Attract

And let me tell you about the psychos — the psychos you attract when you're a big streamer. When you're a small streamer — and I love being a small streamer on Twitch — there are no psychos in my chat. Or if there are potential psychos, they're not acting on it. What really hurts is this: when you're smaller, you get some people who love your stream, and they keep coming through and dropping money every day. They're a supporter. They drop gift subs, they drop stars or bits. And then the bigger you get, suddenly they're not getting enough attention anymore, because you just literally can't see their comments in the chat most of the time. And unfortunately, your brain is wired to be pissed off at negative comments. This is why you'll see a lot of big streamers who actually read their chat are often not in that great of a mood while they're playing — because if there are 30, 40, 50 lines in the chat and they look, the one nasty thing somebody says will get to them the most.

What really hurts is you get people who love you and then flip. I had so many people fall in love with my live stream, and then as we grew and they got less attention from me and became less relevant, they flipped. Now they're sending nasty comments. They're sending nasty messages behind my back. Now they're coming on my stream ripping me with criticism. Now they're posting videos and doing live streams talking about how much Jerry Banfield sucks. One guy actually sent me a text message and said he was going to call the police on me — for what, I don't know what he was going to call the police on me for — but you get all kinds of absolutely psycho stuff like that. There are some even crazier things that happened that I won't go into, because the people involved have asked me not to mention them, so they won't happen again — if I talk about the exact things that have happened to other people as a result of me streaming, those people have said, please don't talk about that, because I don't want to give anybody ideas. Being a big streamer reminded me of something Tim Ferriss said in a video: you don't want to be famous.

Why I Don't Miss Being a Big Streamer

I remember watching all of that before, back when I had this level of interaction on Facebook, and thinking, well, it can't be that bad. I was wrong. Even though in 2022 I got demonetized on Facebook, and it's been uncomfortable making the transition over to Twitch, I'm having more fun doing my live stream for three, four, five, ten people watching at once — maybe a hundred or two hundred people who watch during the whole stream on Twitch — than I was in 2021. I'm having much more fun doing my live stream now. I don't miss getting psycho text messages from people who send me six paragraphs in the middle of the night about all the things I'm doing wrong on my live stream. I don't miss having people who used to love my stream start whining and complaining all over the place in the chat: man, why won't you play with me anymore? You suck. You're just fake. You don't care about your community. I don't miss every single Warzone game I used to lose when I was popping off — get ready for the comments. I didn't even want to look at the comments. I used to mainly just want to win Warzone games so I didn't have to see eighteen people say trash, rat, you suck. You might think it doesn't matter. You might think, oh, I'll deal with that for a hundred thousand dollars a year. It's not worth it. It is not worth it.

Now I love being able to shout out every single person who comes and follows me. When you have three, four, five hundred people following you in one stream, it gets to all be about the numbers and you barely get to know anybody.

When Facebook Changed the Algorithm

One of the worst things that can happen to you is to grow too fast where you don't have a strong foundation, then get dropped on your butt afterwards. My stream blew up in 2021, along with everybody else who was really blowing up then. And then Facebook changed the algorithm and basically just destroyed my page — mine and anyone else's who switched from the old pages experience to the new pages experience. That's when Facebook changed the algorithm, and I got really down and frustrated. Because what sucks when you're a big streamer is you start thinking, okay, from now on, this is how it's going to be. This is normal. And when it drops, oh my God — I hated doing my live stream for a couple of months when I was used to thousands of people watching at once and then it drops down to hundreds. In the background, I was pissed off and resentful every day.

And of course I innovated and figured out ways to pop off again. I figured out ways to hit heights that nobody else on Facebook had ever even done before. Facebook actually contacted me to ask, how exactly did you do this? How did you get your live streams to pop off that much? Those live streams hit almost a million views, and we're talking about ten to fifteen thousand engaged followers. And you know what I did in there? I got so sick of the negativity in my chat that I actually did supporter-only chat. So every single live stream, you've got people pissed off that they can't talk, and then they come in your Discord and whine. They'll actually pay stars just to complain about how greedy you are for not letting anybody chat in your live stream — when the truth is, you just can't take all that nastiness anymore.

The Constant Fear of Losing It

There's even more to it than that. You think, all right, well, that's about it. No, it gets even worse. What gets worse is that when you get used to having all these views and money, there's this constant background fear of losing it. Because if your stream has, like, two people watching, you're not afraid of losing that. What are you going to do — go down to one or zero? When you're a small streamer, you don't have anything that you're really afraid of losing. If your whole stream doesn't work out for some reason, so what? But when you start popping off, there's this background fear that crops up: man, I can't take going back to being a regular streamer ever again. If I can't get this all the time, I'm just not going to do this anymore.

And that happened to me twice, especially on YouTube. The first place my live streams blew up was on YouTube. My live streams blew up, and I got sick of it. Basically, people would only watch if I streamed League of Legends. And I didn't even like playing League of Legends. I hated playing League of Legends most of the time, but people wouldn't watch anything else. So what did I do? I committed to playing League of Legends every single day and paid a coach to coach me, because I wanted to get the most views possible. And that worked to get views. But I was showing up every day, and there's nothing like having the freedom to do whatever you want and then showing up and hating what you're doing. I finally quit gaming altogether right when my YouTube channel was going off on League of Legends — hundreds of concurrent viewers watching, tons of chat, tons of trolls. I quit gaming altogether. I'm like, man, I can't stand this.

I quit gaming in 2016 because I was so sick of playing League of Legends, and I knew that as long as I was willing to play games, I had to play League of Legends — and I couldn't stand to play League of Legends. I sucked at League of Legends, but it was getting views. People thought it was funny how bad I was at the game, and it was funny watching a coach try to help this dude who was that terrible at the game.

There are a lot of streamers out there who don't care. They show up, and they can't let go of the views and the money, and they hate what they're doing, and they grit their teeth and complain about the game and how broken it is. And then you watch that stuff, and then you wonder why you don't have any time to do anything else — because you're pissing it away watching somebody who's not happy doing what they're doing, just because they don't know what else they could do that would be better. In some ways, they're almost hoping to get banned so that they can move on with their life. And in some ways, I've been very relieved that I was demonetized on Facebook, so I could get back into really enjoying my live stream.

If You Grind Your Way Up, You'll Hate It at the Top

The bigger you get, the more challenging it can be to stop paying attention to all this stuff. When you've got two or three viewers, you shouldn't even be paying attention to the analytics at all. What difference does it make whether you got 20, 30, or 50 views on a live stream? When you're a small streamer — small in the sense that this is not your full-time living and you do other things — it should all be about having fun on your live stream. That's the only thing that should really matter. It should never be about grinding and trying to get to the top. Because if you grind and get there, you're going to feel the same way you do right now. If you do your live stream and you hate how small you are and you don't like where you're at, and you grind your way up, you're going to hate how big you are. I know, because that's what I did. I said, I'll do whatever it takes within my integrity — as long as I can talk publicly about it, so I'm not willing to cheat or do anything I wouldn't tell everybody about — but other than that, do whatever it takes to get these numbers. And I got those numbers. Sure, some days I was happy with it. Some days I felt real proud of myself. A lot of days I was just doing my best to say some inspiring words while I was constantly struggling.

Especially when I was getting tons of people watching all the time — man, some of those live streams were miserable. If I did a three- or four-hour stream and didn't win one Warzone game, I don't care how much money I got or how many people watched, I logged off and felt like a failure. If it's just your friends watching you play games, it's often very easy to be relaxed and cool about it. Like, yeah, that's cool, my friends watched me get my butt kicked for a few hours, it's all good. But you know what's embarrassing? Having 100,000 people watch you suck at Warzone for four hours. Watching you run yourself over with a cargo truck, miss your parachute and splat, make dumb mistakes that cost you the game. And some of those are the most memorable. One of the first times I got over 1,000 people watching, I had 1,600 people watching me play Blackout back in the day, and my controller batteries died in the final circle. Some guy comes up behind me and knifes me — and he called it, too. He's like, dude, I think this guy's controller died. My controller died. I was so embarrassed. I'm like, oh my God, 1,000 people just watched me lose to something as basic as controller batteries.

Getting Dragged Behind a Car in Front of a Hundred Thousand People

I just got killed constantly because we were in really high skill level lobbies. I was going like a 2 KD, and I was just getting dragged along. There's nothing like having thousands and thousands, tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of people watch a livestream where you just get dragged behind a car, basically. You purely look bad the entire livestream. You're trying to smile and you're trying to make the best of it, but deep inside you're just like, oh my God, I suck so bad. I finally quit offering those livestreams. I said, I don't care if you do want to pay me $300 — this is miserable. And then I'd play with people, and some of them would be fun, while others would complain about the game for three hours while we were doing a co-stream. That was 2021. Even though outwardly it might have looked like I had a lot of success, inwardly it was as tough of a year as 2022.

In 2022, I got demonetized on Facebook gaming. The drama got to an all-time high when I changed my race, and a bunch of people saw that as an opportunity to turn it into a narrative that Facebook would take action on. When you get this kind of success, you build up an army of haters. You build up so many people that are jealous, and they're just waiting to snipe you as soon as you do any kind of post they can spin a narrative around. When you get this kind of attention, every single post I made, every livestream I did, was getting reported — every one of them. There were people who would come in my chat and say, "I'm reporting every one of your livestreams." And I knew they were doing it, too. Fortunately, the threshold for how many times a stream needed to be reported was pretty high. But finally, on the post where I changed my race, they hit the threshold. They all worked together, brought all their friends and family and anyone who'd join them on Twitter.

When you get this kind of rise, it's leading to what often will be a very painful drop at some point. Sure, sometimes people will sustain things like this and get even bigger. But then you're just exaggerating the problems, too. You're exaggerating all the psychos you're going to attract, all the crazies in the chat, all the friends that are going to flip on you and start getting jealous and wanting money from you. You should read 50 Cent's book. He said when you get to that kind of level — this is Curtis Jackson, aka 50 Cent — he said he'd buy somebody a car, and they would curse him out and say, "50, you gave my cousin a house. Why do all I get is a car?" Dude, it's crazy.

Big Streamer, Small Streamer — You Feel About the Same

I've made this point because almost everything you watch on streaming is all about success. The basic message is that being small sucks and being big is awesome. And I'm telling you, being big can be awesome — but being big can suck, too. I'm telling you that being a big streamer and being a small streamer, the experience is very different in some of the details, but the way you feel is just about the same. When you're a small streamer, you often feel very insecure — like you're not good enough, like there aren't that many people watching. And you'll have this idea in your head: if there were just a few more people watching, and if I could just make a little bit more money, then this feeling would go away.

While that may be true on a temporary basis, there was a sweet spot. There was a sweet spot somewhere at the beginning of 2021 where I really loved doing my stream. There weren't that many haters, and it was new. When I transitioned from 50 or 60 people watching up to 300 to 500, 600 watching, there was a real small sweet spot there where I loved what I did. I had fun. There weren't that many negative, nasty people in the chat, and I could still mostly connect with the community that had been there when it was 20, 30, 40, 50 viewers. There was a sweet spot where it was really fun. But I quickly got used to the big numbers, and then the negative sides quickly started to take hold. I did a livestream in June 2021 where I was really toxic about the whole streaming community — I ripped some of the big-name streamers.

It's nice when you have a bad day, too: all the haters will come out of the closet, the ones that have just been lurking. They'll really dump on you on a bad day. They'll start chanting other streamers' names in your chat. I don't know how many times — probably thousands — people came in my chat and said this guy who cheats at Warzone is better than you, you suck, you camper. There are lots of streams I do on Twitch now with what I think is a perfect-size community. Nobody says anything nasty the entire stream. It's really nice. It's really nice to be able to play a game for a couple hours and chill. One thing about getting those kinds of numbers is it's more difficult to just relax and enjoy your stream, because there are more comments than you can respond to. And I swear it just takes one nasty comment in 30 to mess up your vibe, if you're sensitive. Now, if you're real armored up — F them — that might not bother you. But I'm a pretty sensitive guy.

How Chasing Numbers Drove Away the People Who Loved My Stream

When you focus on getting numbers — one way I grew like this is that most streamers would ban somebody talking that kind of trash in their stream on the first comment, or one of the first comments. I hacked my growth. In this period, a lot of 2021 and especially in 2020, I would let people say anything in my chat, and I would tell people to report them to Facebook if they wanted to get that person shut down. We'd have people come in and say the nastiest, craziest things you can imagine, and they'd make 20 or 30 comments before hundreds of people would report them to Facebook. They'd finally go too far with one comment, and then all their comments would get deleted by Facebook. And in the meantime, some of the people who were real hardcore followers, who loved watching my stream, would get personally attacked. What stinks is to watch your own community members who love your stream get attacked by other people who hate your stream. Then your stream's not a good experience anymore.

I noticed that I was so obsessed with getting numbers that in the process, a lot of the people who loved watching my livestream stopped coming. Because human beings are predictably irrational most of the time. My goal is that when you show up to my videos or my livestreams, you feel better than when you showed up. You show up feeling one way, you stay a little while, and you feel better and better. That's my goal. Well, what happens is if you show up to my livestream and somebody calls you eight different names and you get in a fight with them, and you leave my livestream feeling much worse than when you got there, you unfortunately will not base your behavior on logic. Your brain most of the time will not look at it logically and say, well, this person who attacked you is what happened. What I noticed is lots of people, after they got attacked by someone on my livestream — even if it was just one comment — stopped coming back. That's because their brain says: you felt pain watching Jerry Banfield's livestream, so you shouldn't go back there anymore. What I love is that with a smaller community, it's very easy to keep people who love your stream coming back over and over again, because nobody's attacking them and ripping them a new butt. It's really nice to have a small community that's extremely supportive.

The Duct Tape Over Your Mouth at the Top

The last thing I'll cover here that sucks is that with a big stream, you get a big piece of duct tape over your mouth if you hit a certain level. At a certain level, you get presented a contract where, on any controversial issues, you're not allowed to take a position against whatever platform you're on. So if Mark Zuckerberg feels one way about things, in order to keep growing and sustain on the platform, you get presented a document — it doesn't say it just like this, but it lays out this long list of issues. Some things you're not allowed to have an opinion on at all. Other things you can only present one opinion on. You are not allowed to talk against the opinion of the prevailing platform. So if a platform, for example, has a certain opinion on a certain medical issue, you are not allowed to say anything that could go against that, or you lose your whole contract.

This is what you need to know about almost anybody who has hit certain levels with the numbers on any platform: they are liable to be, or potentially are, in some kind of agreement where, yes, you get preferential treatment and you get additional opportunities to make money. By signing what was given to me after I hit my numbers at a certain point, I got to make lots of money — lots of additional money, we're talking maybe $30,000 to $50,000-plus that I got to make. But I also had to silence myself on a lot of things I really cared about. I wanted so badly to attain the highest level as a creator on Facebook that I quickly looked over these things and said, whatever, I'll just do whatever they want to get what I want. And now that I'm out of it, I'm like, wow — this is what the whole system's doing, isn't it? This is why, when certain issues come out, it looks like everybody thinks a certain way. Because almost anybody you watch has got that duct tape over their mouth if they disagree with what the people in power on that platform want you to hear. I'm grateful today to be free of that, where I can speak my mind about what I think is right and what I think we need to consider — especially if we need to speak it against what the president is saying, or what some BS expert is saying on something.

So I hope this has given you a valuable education today: you could get numbers like this and make money that comes with it — hundreds of thousands of dollars — and it could feel not one bit better than being a small streamer. In fact, you might crave being a small streamer. And you might even become so addicted to it that you're afraid of losing it. And when you do lose it, you may hit the lowest depression you've hit in your career.

The Lowest Point of My Career as a Creator

When I lost all these numbers and all my money on Facebook gaming in February 2022, I hit the lowest point I've hit in my career as a creator online. And there have been lots of other low points. For the first time ever, I actually went and deleted my Facebook page. People said I got banned. I didn't get banned. I deleted my Facebook page for 12 hours, after thousands of nasty comments were coming through. I went and deleted a bunch of profiles online. But Facebook is used to that, and they also told me: if you delete your Facebook page, you're going to lose the tens of thousands of dollars you've got coming to you. And when you've just lost almost all your income, that doesn't seem like a very good prospect. In fact, I've made a total of like twenty-something thousand dollars in profit this year, when I used to make that in two months in 2021. So I'm glad I was able to restore my Facebook page. At the same time, I can't stand to even post to it anymore.

Anybody can tell you they've been a big streamer, but I think it's important to show some actual proof of it. And if you're wondering about the followers: I had millions of followers before this. Even though I got tons of new followers, I actually lost more of the old followers, and some of the new followers, than I gained in new followers. So don't worry about that. It's kind of an artifact of just having a huge Facebook page that you made, that's been around for a long time, and that has a diverse following.

The Reality of Being a Big Streamer

I really appreciate you reading this, and I hope it's been informational and educational. If you've got dreams of being a big streamer, it's a lot darker than you would imagine it is. And I hope you can just enjoy where you're at today. The entire point of this has been helping you enjoy where you're at today. I'm not saying you shouldn't have fantasies and ideas about this, but I want you to have the reality. Being a big streamer is just about the same as being a small streamer, except the difficulty and the challenges are cranked way higher, and the pressure is way higher.

In my experience, if you struggle with anxiety or depression or mental health issues, this is not a good path to go down. I say that because I'm a person who worked and got myself into an absolutely fantastic, healthy position mentally and physically, and this was still challenging for me. Some of you who are already on YouTube, if you're on the edge, I believe this will break you. This is why some creators, all of a sudden, just delete their page and disappear. They finally hit a threshold and they're like, "I don't care, I'm out." And this is why some creators do really crazy things. Some of y'all might say, "That's why I changed my race — because I got sick of all this crap." I just changed my race because that's what I was doing that day, and I just talk about whatever I'm doing.

Come Be a Part of the Community

I am honored you've spent this much time with me. If you actually read all the way to the end here, you're probably in like the top tenth of a percent, and you really need to come hang out with us and be a part of the community — today, the best way to do that is to join the Jerry Banfield Family. Back then, I was live every day on Twitch, and all my videos like this I actually did live on Twitch and then uploaded at least 24 hours later on YouTube.

If you want more of what I've learned about building a channel and a life as a creator, I've put a lot of it together in my YouTube Coaching playlist. I appreciate you reading this.