If you are looking to make some money by adding content to a popular video streaming service, you probably have a lot of questions about how to do this as effectively as possible. Each service has different advantages and disadvantages when it comes to monetizing your content.
Of the two main video streaming services, Twitch is a better platform for streamers than YouTube. This is because Twitch is built to help streamers grow their audience, whereas YouTube’s purpose is as a video library. Twitch has a much larger audience as well, with many more stream viewers each day.
Though Twitch is more popular with both streamers and viewers, each platform offers different things for streamers. Here’s a close look at what the platforms bring to the table.
What to Look For in a Streaming Service
Content creators stream videos for a variety of reasons. Most are looking to share their passion for a game or for another activity while being able to monetize their contributions. In order to fulfill their goals of sharing their content while making money, streamers need to use a platform that will help them build a growing group of fans and followers while also helping them get publicity among other viewers.
Streaming services, such as YouTube and Twitch, provide a place where content creators can post content that will be shared with the world. Once a streamer has a fanbase, they need a consistent (and quick) way to monetize their content while also growing their fanbase. Both Twitch and YouTube provide ways to do this. By making a channel, streamers on both platforms are able to centralize their content and give prospective fans and followers a place to go to watch their videos.
In order to reward fans for their loyalty to a streamer, streamers look for ways to incentive joining their following. They provide custom flairs and other abilities to their followers, create videos and chat rooms that are subscriber-only, and do other things like list off the names of people that donate money to the streamers.
Though for a while it was only Twitch that provided these abilities to streamers, YouTube updated their software to allow for subscriber-only chats, viewer and subscriber polls, and stream clips in July of 2021. YouTube has been trying to grow the number of streamers that use their platform, but they are still missing some key elements of what Twitch offers.
Twitch Streaming Service
Twitch was built around the goal of providing the ideal place for streamers to get noticed for their content. From small streamers exploring a niche hobby to large streamers with thousands of viewers daily, Twitch accommodates them all. Despite the changes that have been made to the market, and despite the competition, Twitch remains the most popular platform for content creators and streamers on the internet.
The main reason for this is because people who post to Twitch and use their streaming service are almost all live streamers of games and other hobbies. This sifts through the visitors that come to the site and makes it so that people who go there are looking for good streaming content, not any of the many videos or other services that are provided by YouTube.
This helps the smaller content creators to get noticed and be rewarded for making quality content. For example, if you love a smaller indie game and you like making videos of it, those videos probably won’t get much attention anywhere else. The audience that would be appreciative of the videos and the content that you make are so spread out and hard to find that you may never find anyone to help you get your content off the ground.
However, if you create a twitch channel and you start to stream your videos, you know that the people that might run into your content are looking for things like what you make. Your videos will be suggested to people that are fans of other smaller indie games, and if your content is engaging and of high enough quality, they will come over to your channel and join it.
Even if your group remains small, Twitch still offers great ways for you to fulfill your dream and monetize your passion. Through paid subscriptions, advertisements, and donations, even a content creator that gets only a few thousand viewers onto their channel can still make some money if the content is good enough and the few fans are dedicated enough.
YouTube Videos
YouTube, though not as clearly dedicated to streaming channels as Twitch is, still brings a lot to the table when it comes to streaming. The main advantage of YouTube is the huge number of videos that are watched and published there. YouTube gets tons of traffic every day, and over 1 billion hours of videos are watched daily—that’s well over 100,000 years of videos. With so many people on this video service, there is a huge audience to market your videos to.
Furthermore, YouTube gives streamers great ways to monetize their work. Videos that get very popular on YouTube can be a source of a lot of money for streamers. In addition to subscriptions and donations, YouTube will pay streamers around $200 for every 1 million views that they generate off of their videos (though rates vary).
The biggest downside of YouTube, however, is that small contributors and streamers that are not very widely known don’t have much of a chance at getting recognized for their work and gaining popularity. YouTube recommends videos and channels that are already popular, with most channels not getting any attention until they find several hundred thousand viewers for each video. For this reason, almost all aspiring streamers start out on Twitch.
Though some Twitch streamers are able to successfully transfer their following from Twitch to YouTube once their channel is big enough, the majority of streamers of all kinds stay on Twitch because of the community of streamers and viewers that is found there.
