Yes, but no.

Live-streaming games on networks like Twitch, YouTube, and recently Mixer and Facebook, has, over the last few years, become a craze among teens and young adults. And with the huge face of Ninja and his primary game Fortnite bursting out of the gaming community and finding itself into mainstream media from 2018 onward, kids are beginning to see the possibility of making a career just playing games on the Internet, and showing your personality to other people.

And as long as you have an Internet connection and a decent laptop, anyone in the world can start a stream in under 5 minutes. All you have to do is install some broadcasting software, enter a stream key, press a button, and boom – you’re live!

So, what’s the deal, then? Why does streaming have such a low success rate, with only a handful of faces ever making it even above a thousand concurrent viewers?

Well, for starters, here’s my take on what the most popular streamers have to make it to the top of the list.

1. CONSISTENCY

The most important thing in the streaming world HAS to be consistency. It seems obvious, but most smaller streamers don’t have enough of a consistent schedule to garner the amount of support to continue in the long run. If you really want to make money in the future off of doing nothing but playing games, consistency is the first stepping stone to finding that type of success.

Just like in other areas of life or other career paths, consistency helps ground people into a steady habit, making the act of streaming become an integral part of their life. And when just starting off, you don’t need to prepare to stream every single day – a set schedule of perhaps a stream at 4 pm on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays is enough to let viewers know that you’re serious about streaming in the future, while still making time for school, work, and other hobbies.

If you look at almost every streamer that made it to the top, they have always had a consistent schedule. People want to know when you go live in order to be there for your streams, and this will eventually give you a consistent amount of viewers when you’re actually online.

2. INTERACT with your viewers

It’s super important to make your viewers feel like they are a part of the broadcast itself. After all, the core of your stream is inside your community, and the way to nurture one is by making friends with people that show up to your streams.

Read the live chat often, make your thoughts known out loud, and try to ask questions that provoke viewers into answering. And if no one is talking, it’s okay! Someone will eventually stop by, and if you’re talking to yourself, they’ll know that you really want to interact with other people, and begin a conversation with you.

Ultimately, interacting with the people who watch you might actually be more important than consistency itself. You need to have people coming back to your streams to watch again, and the easiest way to do that is to make them feel special while watching you.

3. HAVE FUN – don’t worry about numbers, metrics, and statistics

Having fun is essential to the process – streaming SHOULD NOT feel like arduous labor. If you start to feel like it’s not fun after just a few weeks, then perhaps, it’s not the right thing for you.

If you have fun while you’re playing games, and communicate these emotions to your audience, they’ll enjoy your stream as well. On the other hand, if you’re not really enjoying what you’re doing, and show a sense of boredom during a broadcast, people will stop watching. A good way to also ignore the potential obstacle of declining viewership is to hide the amount of concurrent viewers that you have, and focus on the broadcast alone.

You are a form of entertainment, and it’s your job to please the people watching you. You have to acknowledge the fact that people are watching you to have a good time as well, not just because of something like the fact that you’re super good at a specific game.

4. NETWORK with others

One of the biggest boosts that you can get as a streamer is the result of networking with other streamers, or involve yourself into a different, bigger community.

If you can make the right connections early on, getting to a decent amount of concurrent viewers (perhaps 10-30) may actually be pretty easy to do, through mediums like streaming with a group of people. But of course, networking is one of those things that require long periods of time and commitment to develop. Real friendships with people you meet on the Internet can be quite hard, but pulling through with these will ultimately pay off for the long term.

Networking can not only result a better streaming experience, but eventually also in a number of connections in the real world as well.

5. LUCK and SKILL

Sorry for keeping your hopes up until this final point, but a super important factor into streaming successfully is a decent amount of luck, and usually a relative amount of skill in a specific game.

Lots of people do all the right things – stream consistently, show their personality while doing so, and talk with other people, but they still find themselves stuck at a stagnant point of growth. Eventually, luck will have to play into your success, and it can show its form in a kindled connection with a huge streamer, raids from other random people, or people who decide, one day, to just tune into your stream.

And unless you have a great personality, skill often plays into account of how quickly you grow. Statistically speaking, people who are good at a specific game are much likelier to succeed than those with no skill at all. Most top streamers begin by only playing a specific game and becoming super good at it, but eventually expanding to different horizons as a result of a solid foundation of viewers. Some examples of this are xQc with Overwatch, DisguisedToast with Hearthstone, and Shroud with CS:GO.

Following the other four steps will definitely increase your chances of getting lucky and growing a community, but luck and skill can be seen as the reason why most people don’t ever make it into even the hundreds of concurrent viewers. In the end, the lack of both of these factors is the reason why most people end up stuck in the bottom of the barrel, or end up quitting for good.

Ultimately, becoming a successful streamer, just like anything else, requires a lot of dedication and time.  Though the concept seems simple, it’s important to know that it can be a hard and arduous process, with few people actually able to make a living out of broadcasting their playthroughs of videogames.

So, a message to kids trying to get rich through Fortnite:

You’re probably better off staying in school, my friend.

-DZ