You're about to hear why I'm finally quitting Twitch after nine years as a creator. Even though I've got around 6,000 followers and I've done thousands of live streams, it just seems like a big waste of time at this point. It's become a distraction. I've been multi-streaming to Twitch when most of my audience is actually on YouTube. The last video I streamed to Twitch got 78 views there. The exact same live stream on YouTube got 648 views. On Twitch, almost nothing is happening for me. I'm not getting any discovery. I've streamed for years and years, and when I multi-stream, most people end up watching on YouTube anyway.
Why splitting my attention stopped working
When I stream, I have two, three, maybe four viewers on Twitch. Since most people are watching on YouTube, I'm trying to merge the Twitch chat in with everything else, and it splits my thoughts up too. What I've noticed is that people often become the least common denominator. We kind of average everything out. So if I have 10 or more people watching on YouTube but only two watching on Twitch, it starts to feel like, well, this sucks, why even bother? Twitch ends up dragging down my feeling for all of my creative work in general.
I've done Twitch for so many years and I've never made any decent money on it. I did pick up some followers when I played Gods Unchained, but they don't watch if I play anything else. On YouTube, by contrast, people watch me do almost anything. And I make all my money on YouTube. That's where my main audience and my viewership live. What I love is that I can put out YouTube videos, get views on those, and that brings people in to watch my stream. On Twitch, there's just no discoverability in the app itself. Hardly anybody just pops in no matter what game I play, and they almost never keep coming back.
This has been a tough decision. I've gone back and forth on it a whole bunch of times. If you look at my time streaming over the past years, I've been on and off, off and on with Twitch the entire way. At various points I committed and tried to drag everybody over from my other platforms. But you don't want to have more than one call to action for people. I don't want all these competing calls to action. And I get so much more income on YouTube, especially from videos, even though I've done basically everything wrong on my channel in so many ways.
The numbers don't lie
If you look at my official artist channel, I more or less went from nothing, having had another channel, and started putting crypto videos on this one. That brought in $270 in revenue, and for a full-time YouTuber, ad revenue alone is honestly not that much. But do I ever have a month like that on Twitch? Do I ever even come close, starting essentially from scratch on a channel? My original channel that I'd sabotaged tells the same story when I look back over the streaming revenue. The revenue on Twitch is so bad and the ads pay so little. I was streaming a lot in February and I still only made $121, then $158. And you have to be super consistent on Twitch, too.
You'll see whole months where I didn't stream because it seemed like a total waste of time. I didn't stream and instead I was making videos, and my videos were making good money, so I didn't bother. But here's the thing: if you stop streaming on Twitch, it's amazing how fast the audience disappears. So I've consistently been inconsistent on Twitch. Another thing I don't like about Twitch is that it pushes me toward making creative decisions based on Twitch. What you don't want to do in life is make decisions based on a secondary income that end up hurting your primary one.
For example, yes, I made $195 in revenue in November 2022, but I was streaming Gods Unchained every single day. I was doing hours and hours, 84 hours of live stream that month. That's like half a week, all day every day, basically. I was doing long live streams, and if you're going to stream on Twitch especially, it really helps to do long, long sessions. I did get some nice viewership and I applied to be a partner, but some of my viewers were coming straight from the Gods Unchained website. I picked up a bunch of follows, but then I'd try streaming something besides Gods Unchained, and look what happens: almost everybody leaves immediately. They're there for Gods Unchained. If I don't play it, they're gone.
That leads me right back into an environment where I'm not consistently streaming. And if you don't consistently stream, the whole thing falls apart. This month in 2022 I did get a couple hundred in revenue, but what happened before that? I didn't stream at all the month before. And before 2020, it's just straight up dead, just terrible. So yes, I had some big months in 2022, but if you're not going to be consistent, you need to figure out where you actually can be consistent.
YouTube is where I can show up
YouTube is where I've been the most consistent over the longest period of time. YouTube lets me do long form, short form, live streams, and posts all in the same platform. It's the best platform for me as a creator. For so long I thought I could just keep doing Twitch and get an additional benefit from it, but it's not working out. I'm consistently wasting my time and getting distracted on Twitch.
The best month I think I ever had on Twitch was right after I got canceled on Facebook. I picked up a few hundred followers and made $375. By comparison, that's like the crappiest month I've had on YouTube. On my other YouTube channel, the worst month I've had in years is something like $800 or $900. And it's so easy to just record some videos on YouTube. Recording a short is super easy. Recording a not-too-long video like this is super easy. That never happens from Twitch, but I can crank out a video in 10 minutes on YouTube that brings someone to my website who pays $300-plus for a coaching call.
It's been hard to let go. On the surface, of course you should just walk away from Twitch. There's no reason to keep doing it. Look at my last stream summary: I streamed for two hours, an average of three viewers, a max of 16, and that 16 only happened because I got a raid. Compare that to YouTube. I've had a hard time letting go though, because I've streamed so much. I actually did apply for partner before, and I didn't even realize I could just reapply at any time. But I've put in a lot. I've had 358 viewers at the same time once. I've had 32,000 watch hours on my channel. I've streamed over 2,000 hours on Twitch total. And yet I haven't hit 75 concurrent viewers in two and a half years on Twitch. It's gone nowhere.
This is why I'm quitting Twitch. Even though I've got thousands of followers, it just doesn't seem worth my time, and I'm big in life on focus. YouTube is clearly worth my time. I also mirror my videos on X, because on X I get some nice additional reach. All my posts go out to hundreds of people there, which never happens on Twitch. When I go live on Twitch, my posts don't reach hundreds of people. On X, no matter what I do, it goes out. So the only thing I see that's genuinely great right now for content creation is YouTube. They give me a fair share of ad revenue. Twitch gives a fair share too, but they don't do enough to bring people in, and people don't come back easily. If you'd like to talk through content creation with me, I have a lot of experience to share, and you can dig into my YouTube Coaching playlist to see how I think about all of this.