Becoming a Twitch affiliate is easy, but then what?
For me it only took about three months to reach the affiliate level as a Twitch streamer starting from scratch. However I noticed, like many people, that after reaching 3 concurrent viewers it got a lot more challenging to grow the stream.
This blog post looks at why it’s so common to hit a viewership plateau after reaching affiliate status on Twitch.
Why Affiliate is Easy
Affiliate is easy because of the way Twitch is set up.
Most games are in the long tail of Twitch viewership. There will be anywhere from 0–5 people streaming the game at any time. Many of these streamers will have less than 10 viewers.
If the game is popular enough, you can have the great situation where you are the only streamer for the game and there are people checking the page to see who’s online. They only see you. It’s you or nothing.
Thus, even though it’s highly unusual in most contexts, you might have a typical viewer who isn’t actively looking to support “new streamers” still clicking on a stream with 5, 10, even 0 viewers, just because they’re in the mood to watch some speedrun content for a specific game at a specific time.
