Streaming is the new blogging, some say, where total committment to doing something interesting or offbeat in public attracts vast (and monetizable) audiences. But the long tail is still a dream: most people who attempt it have no audience whatsoever. And yet many persist, that 0 slowly burning a soul hole. Patricia Hernandez:
According to people who have gone through it, lacking an audience is one of the most demoralizing things you can experience online. … If live streaming is a practice, the person behind the camera is the product. 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. “I [initially] 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.
Some eventually get a fan or a few, after a few months of nothing….
“Lots of days with 0 viewers, just did my thing, learned what works, still am,” Khryn_Tzu said. “Then it happened. There was one viewer. And they stayed. They didn’t say anything for a few streams, but they kept coming back. Then one night I had to go AFK so I put on some Metallica. Out pops a ‘Good choice in music. I like Metallica.’ It was such an exhilarating feeling to have someone completely unknown to me to stick around for MY content. It had been a hard push.”
There will always be someone to tell you that misery is self-improvement.
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