Split Decision
By: Ziggy Salvation
(6 min read)
Over the past six to eight weeks, I’ve embarked on moving my office to a new part of our home. My wife and I have always referred to my office as my Sanctuary. As the baby approaches two years old, we’ve decided to give him a dedicated space, and I proposed building Sanctuary 2.0. I’m at the point now where I’m just putting tiny little accents on the walls or stringing the last touches of lighting here and there to bring it to full fruition. Inevitably, the follow-up question is if and when a livestream schedule will come back into the equation. Being the overthinker I am, I overanalyze every aspect of returning to streaming that I can. The biggest conundrum being, this time around, I’ve decided that I’m going to do it in a way that’s the most manageable with family, work, and all my other little projects that I overpack into my schedule with an ambition to finish yet rarely do. This time, the big one is WHERE do I make this final attempt, as there is more than one popular platform to do this on, and yet my brain won’t let me come to a concise conclusion on where to push forward. So please excuse me as I hopefully shed light on my thought process that goes into things and what is needed to do so—watch part of my brain melt onto my keyboard right here.
Choice Number One. Twitch, the Titan. The industry standard, at one point in time, before they were purchased by Amazon, was the premier place to go. There was decent monetization, and the chances for discoverability were more than respectable. Nowadays, the Streamer known as Ninja brought streaming to global awareness, and everyone is now in a vast, vast ocean. The way it works on Twitch is when you are looking for content creators in a certain genre, the current amount of viewers is what helps you ascend to the top of that particular list; therefore, as average audiences increase, so do the chances of interaction with new viewers, followers, and subscribers. A perk to the platform is the incentive to hit goals and tasks to unlock your goals to further your efforts to get to the next goal and progress to partner status. Partner means that you’re now contractually exclusive to the platform, earning more in ad revenue, and revenue generated from tips, donations, subscriptions, and bits (Twitch-exclusive tokens). From a viewer’s perspective, you get more ways to potentially interact, Exclusive Emotes for that content creator in their chat room, and any other things you can unlock for using your money to subscribe to them. All in all, if you have a realistic outlook on how difficult the uphill grind may be, Twitch may be your knight in purple armor if you’re willing to do the time.
Choice Number Two. YouTube, the Colossus. It is a great platform and a global giant. One known in every household on the planet with access to basic technology. The perk about YouTube is it’s a chance to double monetize your media. You have the potential tips and donations while interacting live with your audience during live broadcasts. You also have the opportunity to monetize your past broadcasts as videos in your channel and any other shorts or videos on the side you may put out. You are essentially treating YouTube as your entire creative outlet. It also seems, from an outside perspective, that there is a bit more freedom of what can be posted, and the studio part of the site makes it really user-friendly to upload content, who to release it to or keep it as a draft so you can work on multiple projects at once. That in itself is a really useful tool for someone who suffers from what I call “Project ADHD.” And I call it that because it’s always exciting to start a new project until it’s almost done, and then it sits in limbo, waiting for the simple conclusion you just can’t seem to find time for. Haha. This, in my mind, is the current front-runner. They’re finally bringing discoverability to its gaming content creators, and a few of my personal favorites have switched to the platform.
Choice Number Three. Kick. Kick.com has been making a deafening wave in the realm of live-streaming and content creation in the last month. The parent company owns a real currency gambling app made known by advertisements and recommendations on Kick. It’s a double-edged sword because that fact is also why they can give so much more money to the content creators than the competitors. They have the cash cow to back the fifty/fifty split in revenue they’re promoting to bring more people to the platform, and it’s working. The problem with Kick is until they recently resurfaced, they were known for not-so-kind things. There were big rumors of having ties to human trafficking and borderline pornographic content in certain genres. One of the biggest new owners is a streamer that goes by the handle of Trainwrecks. He and the team they brought in have diligently been working to bring security to the site and to give confidence in the name that it will be a much cleaner and less risky place to bring your content. In my opinion, it’s definitely a contender to watch, but on a personal level, I don’t know if I can morally align with a platform that, at one time or another, had that kind of reputation.
Fourth and Final Choice. Rumble. Rumble has been causing gigantic shockwaves in the streaming community. It is best known for defending its content creators’ First Amendment rights. It has quickly earned a reputation, positive or negative, depending on who you ask, as the place to go for conservative content creators. They’ve recently introduced a gaming section to the platform, and personally, this one intrigues me a lot. It’s been a vastly growing platform since 2020 and shows no signs of slowing down. They already have apps on Roku and both iOS and Android devices. Aside from YouTube, this platform has my gears going at about 200 mph with excitement. The most significant risk about Rumble is that there is a subscription needed from the content creator until the benchmark is met to make it free to broadcast. I’m a big fan of this concept because no one will make subpar or shady content if they have to invest initially. Also, the site offers high monetization with a few options. You can monetize more if you have the amount of revenue you’re earning right on the video, and you can also earn more by making the source primarily only available on Rumble. Watching the growth of this platform definitely is keeping it as a second contender and, personally, would be an entirely new experience amongst all my streamer buddies, for no others are on this platform currently.
I hope I haven’t made all of you bored to death reading this, and it’s a bit skewed from what I usually write about. Having this discussion with myself allows me to reflect and decide where to take the next step in my streaming aspirations. At the end of the day, you have to feel confident in your media outlet. Unfortunately, after many years and user names, I’ve lost faith in Twitch, which has slowly been strangling and overregulating its creators and audience alike.
I hope this has also shed a little light on the thought process of what content creators have to determine behind the scenes to decide where to share their content. And I’ve recently been kicking around the idea of setting up an email. For anyone to send questions or comments, you may not have the ever-expanding digital norm that’s taken the world by storm in the recent decade. It’s only getting more and more popular every year. Imagine where it will be in another decade.
Ziggy Salvation
All Things Wellness, LLC
ziggysalvation@gmail.com
twitch.tv/ziggysalvation
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