My friends, I tried multistreaming on Twitch, Kik, and YouTube, and I also tried Facebook and TikTok and several others in the past, so you don't have to. These are the key takeaways that will help make your journey as a content creator so much easier.
I've been a YouTuber now 4,300-plus days, and I've been a full-time content creator since 2012. I've tested just about everything, and what I can say is what you really need is focus. Where you'll do the best is to focus on the places that give you the most and where you can give the most. So think of content creation platforms as places that you have relationships with.
The ideal formula: live stream on Twitch, post videos to YouTube
For me, I've found the ideal formula as a content creator is to live stream exclusively on Twitch, and I've tested so many different formulas for this. I've had huge success. I've gone viral on Facebook, was one of the top 20 Facebook partners, went viral on TikTok, had several videos with millions of views and tens of thousands of followers. I've also got over 30 million views on YouTube. I've got several channels monetized and over 10,000 subs, and one channel over 100,000, over 250,000 even.
And the formula that's ideal is to go live on Twitch, and then when you're live on Twitch, do everything you need on Twitch to film your videos and then publish those videos to YouTube. Long-format videos — short videos suck. Although I've seen people build followings that way, and you need to customize this for yourself. If you watch short videos all the time, then maybe that'll work for you.
What I've found with multistreaming is that it divides the community up, and that Twitch is the best place to have followers. If you could value the worth of a follower on every different platform, a follower on Twitch is the most valuable, because they're just there for a live stream on Twitch. (I've written a whole separate walkthrough on how to multistream for free with OBS if you do want to test it across platforms first.)
And followers on Twitch — Twitch is not really the place to make a bunch of money and grow your following. Twitch is the place to deepen your connections with your existing followers.
You might hear that Kik just flipped Twitch on the Apple store. Stuff like that is very temporary. They've often just paid a whole bunch of money to get it advertised and new people are installing it. Twitch is the absolute king of live streaming. I've tried streaming on Kik — very little activity, very little chat, very few organic followers. In all the streams I tested on Kik, I don't know if anyone actually followed me directly from Kik, but I get organic followers from Twitch. The most possible organic followers are available to you on Twitch. Twitch is great because it has the longest history, it has very consistent notifications, and it has the biggest community.
Multistreaming splits your attention
What happens when you're multistreaming is you're splitting your attention. If you think of it like relationships or jobs, it can be pretty easy to focus and have one great monogamous relationship, as I do with my wife. When I tried to date a lot of different girls, that went very poorly for me, because I didn't do a good job with any of them. And then all the things about each of them that I didn't like, I felt acutely, with all of them.
So the ideal formula is to live stream just on Twitch, and then put videos up on YouTube. You put videos up on YouTube, and ideally, if you can just record the videos while you're live on Twitch and then upload them to YouTube while you're live on Twitch, you can spend more time streaming, and ideally not even edit your videos. That's a great formula, because it allows them to be more authentic, to have that human element that's really stripped from most of the videos you watch. (This is exactly why I dialed in my OBS settings for recording and streaming the way I did.) Then just grind videos on YouTube, and tell everybody on YouTube to go follow you on Twitch, ideally through something like your own website. Then if you ever do need to switch up, you've got it available. I keep these conversations going in my YouTube Coaching playlist if you want to go deeper on the strategy.
How the other platforms trick you
If you want to test all this stuff yourself — where people go wrong, and what you probably don't understand if you're a content creator, is that you get tricked by these other platforms and their algorithms. This is where I've lost the most of my core followers, by getting tricked into these other platforms, like TikTok. You think, when you're making videos on TikTok or you're streaming, that you're getting so many views, but it's a big lie, because so many of those views are just people scrolling past — you have no connection with them.
And what TikTok calls a view is really an impression somewhere else. So on YouTube, I get a lot of impressions every day, but it only tells me something's a view if somebody actually clicks on it and wants to watch it. Whereas on TikTok and Facebook and Instagram, people are just scrolling through, not paying any attention, and you're getting excited about that number, but it's a big lie.
The views on Twitch are generally very high quality, because people are there to watch a live stream. Whereas on TikTok, people are not there to watch a live stream for the most part. You'll get a ton of views, with people just scrolling through your stream, checking on you for a couple of seconds. And what I've found is that having millions of people watch your video for 30 seconds is often pretty meaningless, when you compare it to having a much smaller amount of people — say 10,000 — watch your video for five or 10 minutes on YouTube, or your live stream for five or 10 minutes on Twitch.
What you should be looking at is getting deeper engagement. Get fewer people to watch longer and really connect with you. That's why these other platforms tricked so many people into streaming on them. But they really suck. There are so many of you streaming on these other platforms, and you don't make any money on those. This is the kind of thing I work through with people directly inside the Jerry Banfield Family.
What I actually make from this
I make great money. I've made $20,000 so far in 2024 off of going live on Twitch and then recording videos and putting them on YouTube. And it's my YouTube videos that bring in the money. My Twitch doesn't hardly make any money, but my Twitch deepens my relationships with my YouTube viewers. I'm making a few hundred a month right now from subscribers on Twitch.
However, that's a fraction of what I would be making if I hadn't been so inconsistent with Twitch and sent people over to Facebook, over to YouTube, over to TikTok, over to Instagram, and then back off of one and over to another. Even a couple of days ago, I was live streaming on YouTube. And what I noticed is that the whole Twitch viewership tends to go down when you multistream, because it's better to have everybody all watching in one spot. And Twitch, if you could pick one spot, is the best spot to watch.
Why Twitch beats streaming on YouTube
Why? Because Twitch is not an algorithm-based platform. When someone follows me on Twitch, even if they don't watch me for a year, easily when they come back to Twitch and I'm live, they'll be able to see that I'm live there. That's why Twitch is so good for having people watch you live. And that's why these other platforms suck.
That's why I have 200-and-something thousand subscribers on my original YouTube channel, and my live streams there are just dead. Nobody watches them hardly organically. I have to promote them in open chat to get anyone on them. And even my crypto YouTube live streams, where I often have hundreds of concurrent viewers, the chat is filled with people who often don't even really know my videos. And then it disrupts my organic views on my regular videos. It's better to just crank videos out in the algorithm on YouTube. The live streams do not do as well. They don't get as many impressions. Even if people spend more time watching, it's better to have those minutes on Twitch and the community on Twitch.
Because even if you have more viewers on YouTube, if you don't stream the exact same thing over and over, those viewers are gone. For example, I can stream crypto on my Jerry Banfield crypto channel all day, and I'll have hundreds of concurrent viewers. And yes, I have less on Twitch, maybe 20 or 30 doing crypto. But if I want to stream gaming, I cannot stream gaming on my crypto channel on YouTube without killing it. And that's the big problem. That's why Twitch shines.
The Fortnite trap: getting lasered into one thing
What I see so many of you doing as content creators is you get lasered in to one specific thing you're doing. And that actually ruins the fun. For example, there's a content creator, KingDreDay, who I've been following — we've been following each other for years. He was streaming on Twitch, and now he's streaming on YouTube. He's been growing his YouTube views, and it's been exciting for him. But I've been telling him that it's generally not going to work out streaming on YouTube. Because he's growing his YouTube on Fortnite — solos, and playing Fortnite, sometimes teams also. He makes videos, and he gets excited because there are more viewers on his YouTube live than there are on his Twitch. But if he tries to play anything besides Fortnite, generally his viewership will not even see that he's live. Lots of people who watch his Fortnite streams are likely to not even see it if he does something besides play Fortnite.
And that's what sucks about streaming anywhere besides Twitch — the algorithms are set up so specifically, by specific games or types of content, that what will happen is you'll get bored over time. You'll grow something that, if you then want to transition into creating a different kind of content, just won't carry over. Twitch is the only place where you can be very flexible with your content. I can switch games up now. On Twitch I can do crypto, music, just chatting, and gaming — and I can do all of it in one stream. But on YouTube, I have to have different channels for everything.
The most fair deal, and a little diversity
So I'm no longer streaming anywhere except Twitch. And I also don't bother putting videos up anywhere besides YouTube. Because to me, Twitch and YouTube are the best combination, and they're the most fair deal for me. Twitch gives me like half of whatever I earn on Twitch, and YouTube gives me around half as well. And both of them have the biggest communities for what they do. YouTube is the biggest for video watching, and Twitch is the biggest for live streaming.
It also gives me a little diversity. That way, if something goes wrong with my YouTube — whether it's the platform, or my accounts, or whatever — then I've got Twitch. And if something goes wrong with my Twitch, I've got YouTube. You also never want to be all in on one platform.
So I've put thousands of hours into streaming, and into multistreaming, and into streaming exclusively on Facebook, exclusively on YouTube, exclusively on Twitch, and even on other platforms you've never heard of. The absolute ideal formula is: stream only on Twitch, then put videos up from your stream on YouTube. It's super straightforward and super easy. I hope this helps someone have an easier time as a content creator. If you enjoyed this, you can watch my newest creator videos in my YouTube Coaching playlist.