Get on social media and tell people about your stream.
Trick your live stream out with overlays and plug-ins that make the experience more fun for the viewer, such as mini-games where fans have to keep a virtual pet alive. Play games that aren’t oversaturated with other streamers already. Practice your commentary, and vocalize your thinking. Make sure you have a good technical setup. Veteran streamers often have a list of talking points on-hand to help out newbies, one I’ve seen repeated many times across social media platforms. Lacking an audience is one of the most demoralizing things you can experience online. “I kept internalizing the viewership numbers to mean that I was the problem, that I wasn’t funny enough, that I wasn’t good enough at games.” After a year of hard work, he estimates that he now gets around 10 concurrent viewers per stream. While there are things you can practice and improve, your popularity as a streamer comes down to whether or not people like you or find you interesting. If live streaming is a practice, the person behind the camera is the product. “It was disheartening at times,” says Burke, who nonetheless kept live streaming through it all. Sean Burke, a streamer who spent about a month broadcasting popular games like Overwatch without an audience, says that it’s easy to take things personally when nobody turns up to your broadcast.
“Been streaming on and off for 4+ years and everytime I come back I go weeks where the majority of time I’m streaming to no one,” another Redditor wrote. “I’ve come to a realization that streaming just isn’t working for me.” “It’s fucking hard to stay positive when doing this 5 days a week when it feels like nobody drops by,” another Redditor wrote in a different thread, after spending months streaming to nobody. “It’s kind of exhausting playing to an empty room day in and day out with no results,” one Redditor wrote on a now-deleted thread on r/Twitch. But when seemingly everyone wants to record footage or live stream, who ends up watching the content?Ī promotional image for a Twitch post about what makes people come back to the site. Some parents note that their children pretend to unbox toys to a nonexistent audience, and teachers report that their students often say they want to pursue YouTubing as a career. The rise of popular (and profitable) influencers on platforms like YouTube and Twitch has also made the idea of being an online influencer aspirational. With the push of a button on your game console or phone, you can share whatever you’re doing at that exact moment with friends and strangers alike. The number grows each year, thanks in part to how easy it has become to live stream, and platforms like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube also increasingly encourage people to share and watch live stories. Twitch, the leading live streaming platform where people play games, make crafts, and showcase their day-to-day lives, attracts over two million broadcasters every month. Hopstad has been streaming to largely nobody for the last five years, and he’s not alone in this pursuit. What Hopstad didn’t know then was that this would be the start of an even more difficult journey to make connections with other people. Famed for its brutal and exacting gameplay, Dark Souls is a popular game to live stream: if you’re going to die hundreds of times, you might as well perish with some digital company to lighten the mood. When John Hopstad first descended into the virtual world of Dark Souls in 2013, his mission was to save a decaying world.