EVERYTHING You Need to Know About Twitch Affiliate

All right good evening to you one and all hope everybody’s had themselves a wonderful wednesday evening hello hello hello and welcome to streamer square i the workshop series my name is shadow temple i i have been uh doing workshops here for the past couple of weeks uh just talking about various topics

Especially as they pertain to twitch uh twitch streaming uh kind of exploring the the platform and all it can do for you and uh what you where the next steps that you can take as you kind of continue in your journey either as a viewer or as a broadcaster uh

Today’s plan uh has to do with being an affiliate how to get uh how to of course reach being an affiliate and then uh what to do once you do right what does it actually entail what sort of things do you need to get done as soon as you hit those achievements

And uh what awaits beyond i i’ve done two workshops so far in the past if uh if you’re like coming into this and you’re like i’m not quite sure what’s going on um i’ve done i’ve done two workshops previously one that has to deal with i twitch itself and what the platform is

And what it can do for you as well as on the very other end of the spectrum uh how to get become a partner on twitch i just realized though as i was writing as i was finishing up those two workshops that there really wasn’t anything in the middle between those two things

Which is of course the affiliate program that many of you might already be familiar with the uh how this workshop is going to play out is that uh a chunk of the begi of the very start of this workshop is going to be dealing with uh

What affiliate is uh what it isn’t as well as discussing uh how to achieve that point if you’re trying to get up to that point this information is going to be very useful to you uh if you’ve already achieved affiliateness uh worry not we will be talking plenty

About what to do once you get there and what sort of things you need to make sure that you are uh keeping on your keeping on top of and keeping track of as you go along now the nice part about doing these as opposed to you know um just having a recorded video

Or something well maybe you’re watching this is recording later in which case apologies but uh we this is a live workshop right we’re streaming this live on twitch right now on twitch.tv streamer square which means that we can have ourselves a bit of a live forum uh if you have any questions about

The affiliate program or about twitch or about streaming or anything that we kind of touch upon brush upon or otherwise uh kind of breathe upon uh be sure to check it out or be sure to ask those questions in the chat and i will be keeping an eye out like a

Uh drunken hawk and hope that i see it as we go along alright so before we begin talking about affiliate i as the narcissist as i am should talk a little bit about bit a little bit about myself so that we understand where we’re kind

Of going with this it’d also help if i actually started my presentation as opposed to just showing you the preview i like a little noob so twitch affiliate a primer with shadow temple a little bit of background about myself before we uh truly get started on this i’ve been streaming on twitch since

About 2014 i kind of dabbled here and there a little bit before that uh back when it wasn’t just justin tv as well but i really got serious about it and pretty much streamed nightly i sin for about six years now um i was part of the affiliate program once it

Literally the first uh step actually uh the affiliate program came out in april 24th of 2017 and i was in actually in the first wave of that i then uh became uh partnered on twitch back in 2018 just about a year later after i got my or after the affiliate program started

I most of my stuff involves uh kind of the the vague term of variety content i but that really kind of focuses on mostly things that i can do voice acting for uh when i’m not streaming i am teaching i am voice acting i am hosting various events not as much

As i used to can’t get out a whole lot uh and minecraft youtubing because that’s a thing i do now um so yeah i i’ve been in a long story short i’ve been a part of the uh kind of i’ve been a part of the twitch community for a very long time um

I have explored and experienced a lot of these things i have succeeded and failed in so many ways over the years then i want to uh try to help uh you guys uh avoid the failures that i did or at least uh experience a mild form of them uh

Inoculate yourself from those failures if you will uh and also of course try to lean towards those successes that i found as i pushed along throughout all of this and again if you have any questions as we go along please do so if you have any questions about my background or anything like

That you can hit it up as well so yeah uh let’s go back to uh you know mid april 2017. i twitch before this point had uh pretty much two categories of broadcasters on the platform of course you could stream on for free on twitch at any time you just had to

Make yourself an account and you can still do that today uh but there was really only two things that are two kind of statuses that an account could have either you were just a standard uh twitch account which just had its standard uh recorder uh streaming capabilities

And you could keep a few of the videos on there and of course have your own chat but that was about all you had uh alternatively of course you had the partner program where uh if you achieved a certain amount of viewership uh much more than uh than even the current

Partner program otherwise sets uh then you can get yourself a subscription button where you uh people could pay monthly in order to get emotes and things out of your channel uh the affiliate program was introduced then i i believe at the twitchcon 2016 and then actually

Uh rolled out at the start of 20 or midway through 2017. uh to give something in between for those who uh may stream you know to the to the dozens of viewers instead of hundreds uh with the expectation and the power to allow you as a streamer to gain revenue

From the things that you do uh beyond just third-party kind of sources right so let’s talk about what this whole affiliate thing is twitch of course for those unaware if you’ve somehow wandered in here and you’re like oh god what where’s the there’s there’s a box of words

Moving over here and a screen over here and what is all this uh twitch is a live streaming platform and it’s hard right uh you as a as a person currently watching this i most likely has an account that you can actually either chat on the side with

Or you can use it to broadcast yourself and you can broadcast your games you can broadcast cooking uh cleaning uh punching things i guess i don’t know why punching came up immediately after cooking cleaning regardless you could do a lot of things on twitch and it’s pretty fun

Uh there’s a wide variety of content that you can also explore both as a viewer and as a broadcaster when it comes to being a broadcaster on the platform there are three main areas it can be these days right like i said you can be the kind of the standard

New streamer there’s not really a technical name for a non-affiliate non-partner uh they kind of swap between regular community and new uh which is to say there’s just no additional fancy things attached instead it is all just whatever you got when you start up your account the affiliate program then is a a

Program where if you meet certain metrics on your channel you then have access to new uh new capabilities new uh features on twitch that you didn’t have access to before as a new streamer and then once you eventually work your way up past affiliate you can eventually then reach kind of the ultimate

Elius public eye point on your channel which is partner again if you want to learn more about the partner program i did an entire setup about the twitch partner program uh that you can check out a previous workshop for i believe it’s both on the youtube

Channel and saved as to zavod on this channel as well so why should you care about becoming an affiliate right so yeah okay you get some new stuff if you become an affiliate on on twitch great but what does that actually mean right well the biggest thing that it really

Really set up back when it was first uh introduced was again this idea of being able to monetize your content so i before that of course once again you pretty much unless you had like a paypal link or one of the very early sort of alert systems

Uh prior to the affiliate program uh you were pretty much just out of luck in terms of trying to monetize your stuff uh especially on platform uh the twitch affiliate program fixed that by allowing uh pretty much every broadcaster that really seriously streams the ability to uh collect subscriptions from viewers

To collect bits from viewers and to run at or advertisements more recently uh as of more recently on your channel and we’ll talk about what each of those three mean and what to expect when you if you do become an affiliate uh of what you’ll get from each of those things

But those are different options for a broadcaster to earn revenue on their channel as a result uh you can see there’s slight differences between the affiliate and the partner um and we’ll talk more thing about or more things about like the cheer modes and sub emotes and things like that a

Little bit later but this is just kind of a thousand foot view uh other things involved uh this is actually a really important one here and why if you’re on the fence about becoming an affiliate as opposed to being a regular just a new streamer because you do technically have an

Option um transcoding is an extremely powerful tool on twitch uh partners are the only ones who are guaranteed it i affiliates are gearing um are almost almost guaranteed it in the sense that they get priority access over or over the rest of the the crowd uh what transcoding does for those unaware

Is uh if actually if you go down to the bottom of this stream right now you should see a little cog that you can use to change what sort of resolution you have on the stream um hopefully you’re watching it at the highest resolution so you can see the

Fact that i didn’t shave in time for the stream today uh sorry uh but there’s a if you are running on a regular channel there’s a pretty good chance you don’t have that cog which means that i whatever stream that you are watching whatever stream that the broadcaster is sending out the viewers

Have to watch it themselves now doesn’t sound so bad but if you are streaming at a very high bit rate a very high resolution and someone is trying to watch that on their uh terrible wi-fi at home or like on a cell phone as they’re commuting to work or something like that

They’re going to have a hard time keeping up with your broadcast of course you want to have the highest quality content that you can provide but if nobody can watch it is there really a point is broadcasting in the first place and so i that or because by becoming an

Affiliate you get yourself a much greater chance of earning that transcoding right which is a really powerful thing uh transcoding is is locked to certain servers and it is given out on a first come first serve basis with only guaranteed reserve slots for partners i

Spent a lot of time on that but that’s a really important thing when it comes to becoming an affiliate uh squad streaming you don’t get it uh just only because you do need guaranteed transcode access for that we’re not gonna worry about that too much uh if you have if for whatever

Reason you decide that you want to have a stream that is for subs or your subscribers only since you have a subscription model on your channel you also can provide uh subscriber only streams uh you only get 14 days of vod storage unless you go for twitch

Turbo which is an entire monthly payment system that you can do to get an extended vod storage back over to the partner side on the right side there i should mention by the way since this is the only page that actually had the affiliate kind of moniker on this table

Uh just keep looking at that middle line here uh when it comes to looking for uh this or what what exactly you’re getting as an affiliate uh other things too uh reruns and premieres uh some people like to upload videos onto their twitch channels let’s say you made like a music video

Or you really wanted to kind of have some or you wanted to re-show some of your previous best streams on your channel uh those are available to you as an affiliate they’re not available to you as a new streamer i suspect that twitch had too many people loading up uh gigabytes and

Terabytes of content onto a dead twitch channel and they wanted to at least have some way of making money off of it so they uh they introduced the ability uh that only affiliates or affiliates and partners are allowed to load things onto their channels or rebroadcast things from previous times

Other things here um when it comes to uh having payments uh you know and you getting paid from the revenue that you’re on twitch um it’s pretty close to what partners deal with these days uh you have chargeback protection when it comes to bits um you have or

Payment happens on a 50 a net 15 day time frame which we’ll talk more a little bit later and uh the payout fees uh whenever you have like your money transferred from twitch to whatever sort of payout service that you use uh you will have to pay for the fee yourself partners uh

It is covered by twitch instead so this is just kind of the basic uh kind of ten thousand view or ten thousand foot view sort of uh opinion on what like what sort of features an affiliate gets versus a regular streamer and then of course versus a partner

And to your point as told by dylan uh that’s actually a reason why i think or at least personally as a broadcaster i like bits is that that chargeback protection really does give you a piece of mind right uh when you see bits are cheered across

Your channel you know that that money is going to you and it’s not going away and that’s really nice and it’s all because the bits have to be purchased in advance uh before someone cheers them towards you which i certainly appreciate uh as opposed to people giving you tips which could be

Then charged back uh for thus for forcing the streamer to of course both pay back uh the tip that they received and usually also a surcharge for such things um it’s true though it doesn’t it doesn’t always necessarily protect you if someone tries to uh game the system uh when someone tries to

Give you or tries to gain the system to get more ad bits which i’ll talk a little bit more about later uh or if they try to game twitch prime which we’ll also talk a little bit about later uh that will kind of blow back but usually a vast majority of the time

You’re staying pretty safe just kidding there’s another section of this table there are so a few more features here that you also get uh channel points was something that was more recently rev or uh released to affiliates as well the idea being that uh there is a set of

Currency that you actually see the bottom of streamer squares uh ch chat as well where you can earn a uh a free kind of loyalty currency for your channel and then you can use that same currency then to reviewers can reuse that to redeem various uh different products and fund services

That uh people come up with as you can see with morag highlighting their message uh using 300 of the streamer books or whatever this currency is called squares it makes sense squares there you go uh other things that are uh that are allowed in there you get access to the uh

To use uh in chat or polls which are pretty nice uh your you and your partner moderators are allowed to create polls uh that pop up in the chat natively which is super nice uh you also uh once you have been an affiliate for a while i think at least 60 days of

Broadcasting and you are in good terms with the uh with twitch terms of service on your channel you actually also get to have your emotes uh pop up uh immediately as soon as you upload them uh we’ll talk a little bit more about the upload process for emotes and badges of things

Like that later on but just know that eventually you can just get them loading in as opposed to having them manually approved which is pretty nice uh pretty much nothing else that uh comes up for affiliate uh when it comes to actual factual uh pieces inside of twitch

But it is a pretty handy thing all right so let’s keep moving along i’ve spent enough time here uh other things though outside of twitch itself is that uh you know when you become an affiliate you have to sign a contract you are a you are a contracted uh

Independent contractor through twitch uh and you have to keep uh you have to keep in mind of that right it isn’t always necessarily a good thing it’s not necessarily a bad thing either it’s just something that you really have to start thinking about beyond just like the twitch terms of service

And not just being a terrible person um you also of course the biggest thing again is just and i i don’t i can’t stress this enough as someone who streamed a lot before affiliate uh became a thing you just don’t have to depend on third-party sites

For revenue uh viewers seem to be a lot more inclined to be more excited about giving you support if you are uh if they can give it to you on the same platform that you’re streaming on and uh by having that arriving that ability is super fantastic

Uh it also provides a bit of a let’s say an intangible social slash networking status um people are a lot more are going to be a lot more uh willing to work with you if um you are uh if you can prove that you have you’re kind of streamed before an

Affiliate and being an affiliate is excuse me sort of that badge of honor for uh showing off that like yeah i’m i’m pretty serious about this i’ve streamed once or twice before i have some i people have watched me for longer periods of time than just me starting up

And that can mean a lot for people who you might want to collaborate with in the future it is uh it is a stepping stone towards uh greater social statuses later on of course when it comes to twitch but it is a pretty powerful spot on that as well

There’s a i mean i’m not even sure if it’s necessarily a sneaky that’s that’s just a straight up triforce there isn’t it also for some reason twitchcon 2017 they gave me two i don’t know why uh if you’re an affiliate can you also stream on youtube and not mixer

Uh only if you are not streaming on twitch simultaneously and we’ll talk actually a bit more about the uh the affiliate contract later on but the answer is effectively that if you’re streaming on twitch you can only stream on twitch while you are contracted through the affiliate contract good question though connie dolphin

Absolutely so uh we talked about what affiliate is let’s talk also about what affiliate isn’t yes in the 24 hour restriction i have like a whole slide about it because people are like wait a minute what uh we’ll definitely talk about that in the near future too

So what is an affiliate uh number one a job uh you when you sign up again as a twitch affiliate you become an independent contractor through under twitch and and or amazon and uh that isn’t necessarily mean that you suddenly have a career in this right you just have the ability to earn

Revenue i it’s like putting up a tip jar next to you next to you as you start uh playing your guitar on the street right there’s a chance that you’re gonna make a lot of money on that way but you still have to you you still has to be you

Pushing ahead to try to make that happen right uh norris affiliate a guaranteed success or income stream for you or your channel um just because you suddenly become an affiliate you might actually sometimes when you do become an affiliate you sometimes see maybe a little bit of a boost because

Your viewers will be like yay you know such a such good affiliate congratulations and they’re super excited maybe you have a little party uh and that’ll give you a little kind of honeymoon period but for the most part you’ll go right back to where you were

And you just have to keep uh pressing on forward right is by no means the apex of your streaming adventure it is more really just the start of for being perfectly honest um it is something that you uh should strive to hit uh relatively early and then just keep

On working past that right and nor is it nor is it at the end of the hard work as i mentioned and or a simple process there are a lot of things that go into this uh that go into becoming an affiliate both the onboarding process and then also

Keeping track of all the things that happen as a result of you being an affiliate uh that you do need to keep track of under penalty of law and things like that yeah that’s right streaming can take you to jail anyway we’ll talk about that a little bit later on anyway

So uh before we get into how to become an affiliate and what the sort of steps you have to take once you do earn like the the ability to do so are there any questions that we’ve that we haven’t hit upon so far and uh if

If you ask a question and i don’t have the answer for it like and i have the answer later on i’ll tell you as such but um i will try my best to otherwise answer the questions before that let me take a little sip of tea of i

Have no tea it’s only water today and then we’ll move on from there anyway so uh excuse me i never changed this excuse me this is why i need to have i need to hire an editor and then fire them there we go so how to affiliate right

Not how to partner it even says affiliate right there how to affiliate so if you go to if you are a broadcaster on twitch and you haven’t had an opportunity to um if you have an opportunity to necessarily look through exactly how becoming an affiliate happens there is an entire achievement

System built into twitch i that system involves uh going through and uh just they’re kind of little little milestones on your channel that you can earn that uh for the most part don’t mean a ton other than just those are things that you might want to shoot for in order to

Continue your growth uh the path to the affiliate is kind of the first major uh milestone of a channel and actually is cont or contains a set of smaller achievements to try to hit right uh those the the following that you see on the screen here are the

Things that you need to achieve in order to become in order to uh qualify to become an affiliate on twitch the first one is uh reach 50 followers that can happen any at any time and uh you just need to make sure that

You get up to 50 and stay at 50 or more uh before continuing onward the rest of them then are judged based on a are based on a 30-day rolling window but behind the present day so i if you were looking to see if you uh if you qualify for affiliate right now

You would look at your stats from today all the way till about uh you know early to mid july and based on that information you would find out whether or not you hit those various milestones uh things such as streaming for eight hours you need to make sure within a

30-day period you are streaming for at least eight hours each time uh other things include and give me just one second here uh other things include uh making sure you stream those eight hours over the course of seven different days i that is uh that means that you know

You can you don’t have to stream in like one week certainly and you don’t have to stream every day in that week but you do need to make sure that you are spreading out those streams throughout that time um as for example for myself i streamed every day so hitting that particular

Achievement was not very difficult but for some of you you may only stream once a week or twice a week in which case if you’re going for that particular affiliate push you may have to try to plan to spread out a few more streams throughout that particular month

As you’re trying to make that happen um you also and this is the one that catches people the most is you need to hit an average of three viewers um that is for for someone just starting off i totally get it it’s a tough thing to hit uh because for frequent times especially

At the beginning of your stream you got maybe one and it’s you you’re the one watching your own stream um and convincing people to get into your stream at the very beginning is extremely difficult to do right and we’ll discuss how to help you kind of get there in order to push it

Off uh the nice part about getting to affiliate though is that things like hosts like raids like embedded views things like that are all allowed yes i was just actually going to answer that cutting dolphin uh in my partner uh my partner workshop i mentioned the fact that twitch actually excludes certain types

Of viewership away from the uh from the qualification number for partner which is 75. um that is that one’s pretty tough to hit because you can’t ha you can’t take viewers from hosts which is when a uh another broadcaster or another channel decides to put their your channel on

Their channel to give them a little to give yourself a little boost uh or raids when people send your viewership over to your channel things like that aren’t necessarily counted in the partner achievement set things like that however are absolutely counted in the affiliate set so if you’re working with other

Broadcasters and you happen to know their streamers uh you know host each other right support each other in that sense don’t be like hey host for host because that’s kind of a little silly but uh you know just just be be a good neighbor on twitch and you can find people who

Who will help you in that sense right that’s true just get rid of the referrer raid and then then they’ll never know they’ll never know a fun fact when i actually got partnered i would uh i would ask people who are going to raid me just just post the link in chat do

The old school method it’s fine it’s fine um and yes you chorus can’t steal other people’s viewers of course but you know what you can still have yes the hosting i should also mention happens when channels are offline not typically online so that’s a different way to do it right

Uh but yeah hit these uh hit these various values within the past 30 days and you are going to be qualified for it it’s an automatic process twitch doesn’t like send you an application or anything like that uh then that they then have to review to make sure that you’re good for that

Uh just based on your merits other things will do that uh but yeah the check mark not the dreaded check mark in chat you’re just here because you want to steal my viewers because you’re verified and i’m not except also this channel’s verified and so am i i yeah

A very sad dog in the other room pardon me okay so let’s say you uh you’ve been going through those achievements maybe you’ve been streaming for a while and you’re trying to figure out uh what’s going on but you’re not not quite sure how to hit those marks maybe

Maybe you got three viewers but maybe you can’t have 50 followers maybe uh vice versa you’ve got all the followers you need uh but you can’t you’re having a hard time hitting that three viewer mark right um the first thing you really need to focus on

And i discussed this uh length of the partner workshop as well but a lot of these same things still apply um find ways for people to find your content this sounds really silly and really simple it’s like yeah duh i’m trying that why help uh the biggest the biggest mistake

That i see new streamers do when it comes to this particular step is they assume that this can all be done on twitch and the answer is while twitch’s own algorithms for finding newer streamers are getting better it’s still not perfect and it’s something you do

Need to focus on as you are as you are trying to grow as a streamer um can you also please address this support small streamers thing we certainly can um you do need to but you do need to expand beyond your own kind of four walls of your own particular channel

Uh if you try to stream on a particular directory for example uh let’s say you play a game that’s incredibly popular um then there’s a situation where that’s uh you’re not gonna be found amongst everybody else right and that’s kind of a bit of an

Issue so you do need to find other ways to be found whether it be uh being on social media uh making sure that you are posting i know that i know a lot of people are like oh but i don’t like social media i don’t like twitter i don’t like

Instagram uh you don’t like tick tock but you know what you might have to worry about that after a while um those are those are places where the algorithm works a little bit differently and it’s a little bit more rewarding to people who are willing to play kind of

The hashtag game and keep track of things and provide regular content there and those can bring people up towards that way with that as was has been requested by us told by dylan here uh there are uh some traps out there in social media land when it comes to

Trying to find support for your quote unquote small stream uh if you see tags or accounts on twitter on instagram and places like that that are like support small streamers or hashtag support under five viewers or things of that nature um those those ideas of like small streamers banding together to try

To support each other is a noble as a noble thought right uh if we you know rising tide raises all ships and if we all just work together we’ll make this happen but in practice what a lot of those communities do is they i pretty much just collect

Followers from people who are very desperate to collect attention without necessarily putting a lot of work into it what i mean by that and i’m not this is an insult to yourself if you have done this yourself but nobody is looking at that hashtag to find news channels to watch

The only people are looking at that hashtag are people who are trying to find viewers to watch their stuff if that makes sense uh and that’s a problem right if you are uh if the hashtag for finding or for supporting smaller streamers is only used by the people by the

Streamers who want support and no supporters then it doesn’t do a whole lot right and that’s not so good right you have to think about uh as a viewer who is going to find or how are they going to find something that they want to watch

And if you think that they are going to be like oh support smaller streamers today i’m going to go to my local mom and pop shop local co-op and uh make sure that i collect the they’re not going to do that on twitch they just aren’t like they they might find

Some small streamer that they really enjoy but they’re going to do that more organically or find your channel via other means whether it be maybe a fun bi or viral clip that you had going on maybe a good post here and there maybe you used a hashtag for a game that

They really enjoy uh that maybe is a little bit more niche than your average streamer those things can be really handy for that and so it’s a really good idea to kind of think about how you would want to go find about or go about finding a new channel watch

And uh where that would actually take you given the fact that three viewers in the grand scheme of things is not incredibly big uh invite your friends and family i know that might sound a little cringe but your friends and family want to support you right and if they know you’re trying to

Take this seriously and you’re enjoying yourself and they love seeing what you do and you just want to have a good time as long as you’re being nice about it you’re not being too pushy have them come in say hello make it have your make your mom

An account and ha let her watch you uh was a mistake that i made two years ago and i still haven’t outlived it but it’s an important step especially if you’re trying to hit that three viewer mark once you get affiliate as long as you keep streaming they’re not

Going to take it away from you might as well try to get it up there with uh with a couple of friends and as how the twitch algorithms work the more viewers you have the better chance that people are going to find you and so if you can build yourself a nice

Little base to start you’re going to have a little bit easier uh time trying to build up from there if that makes sense uh otherwise yep be persistent in engaging on social media uh if people uh don’t er if people expect fun stuff from you they’re going to keep

Checking out your stuff on social media social media if you don’t uh post frequently um they’re probably not going to pay attention as much so just make sure you try to throw stuff out there right it doesn’t have to always be grade a content just make sure you’re putting

Something out there other than hey guys i’m going live here we go and then that’s the that’s your entire feed of social media right toss other things out there be be personal get a little bit of it uh get a little bit of vulnerability out there ask questions post fun pictures just

Just be a person on social media and let people in let people feel like they’re part of something uh otherwise um collaborate with other streamers of your size if you are playing especially like an incredibly niche game like let’s say you’re a big fan of roller coaster tycoon too

Like i for some reason am uh and you were like oh man you know there are like only four other people that stream this game and a lot of them don’t get a ton of viewers but they get some um if if people are going to this niche game and they’re

Trying to find trying to find streamers that do this you can support each other by rating each other with with like interest and things like that that can be a really powerful tool by allowing each other to kind of network and connect with each other you are sharing the wealth in its own

Way in that you you these viewers that are interested in your content are going to be also interested in some similar content and then hopefully in return you receive that sort of support in exchange um in the time that i’ve been streaming i have never been disappointed

Uh from rating somebody that i at least checked out beforehand that’s an extremely important uh like i know sometimes people feel like well if i if i share my viewership then then people will go away and they’ll stop coming to my channel but if you if you try to just

Hide if you’re just trying to hide in your own corner and you don’t try to work with other streamers it’s going to be very difficult to kind of expand outward talk to people get in people’s streams and and kind of learn who they are and if you like what they

What they do then give them support where you can i you would not believe how many friends i’ve made on twitch by just rating channels that i i you know knew a little bit and then they raid me back and then i meet him at twitchcon and then like

I don’t know i get jobs later as a result of that it’s a great feeling and it’s it’s it really works out really well as long as you’re willing to kind of put yourself out there and if you don’t get anything back then you just move on it’s not a big deal

Uh speaking of niche uh trying to find things that are unique right trying to find uh ideas that are i i know when on a broadcasting platform where there are two million and or monthly subs or broadcasters it’s tough to find things that people haven’t done before

But you don’t have to necessarily do something entirely new just something that not everyone is doing and so if you can find your way out of the kind of top games if you can find your way out of like just chatting on its own or things

Like that you can find yourself a little bit of a smaller space it means that there’s a smaller pool for viewers to pull to pull from if they want to see that particular bit of content and as a result you have a much better chance of being found during those times

Especially when you’re first starting off you always go follow people already the channel you’re always watching yeah yeah actually whenever i uh yeah certainly whenever i got raided i even just every time someone followed me i’d check to see if they were a broadcaster as well

And uh if they followed me i would follow them back and maybe i’d go and rate them later and then they they seem to be really excited about they’re like i watched you earlier now you’re here that’s kind of cool and then i’ve made a lot of friends that way

Right back when twitch send an email for every follower you got at least i don’t know if they do that for all channels anymore but they don’t do it for mine anymore and the last thing is like uh and i mentioned this too uh in the in the previous one

Be willing to say yes to stuff if someone’s like after you do your research of course after you do your research be willing to say yes to stuff that you are that may put you a little bit out of your comfort zone if you think it’s going to be fun and

And kind of or maybe like charity work or things of that nature um it’s amazing what sort of doors open up to you if you are more willing to kind of put yourself out there the number of weird things that i’ve done on twitch uh is a lot it is

Is something that if you told me that i was doing that four or five years ago i would think what happened to the the shadow of today um but those sort of things do really do pile up right and uh if you’re not getting those opportunities try to make those opportunities

Uh one thing that i like to do is put together a couple of streamers and uh play a tabletop game together on stream that can be a lot of fun you meet a lot of people that way you kind of get to know them as you uh

Talk your way through like a little one shot or things of that nature or just invite people to play other games with you it’s it’s a lot of fun to kind of build up those little collaborative opportunities or if you’re going to like a communi like a community meetup when those exist again

Uh that’s a really fun way to kind of get involved too in talking to people and figuring out what sort of things that other people do as well so these are the ways that people for fun you know for people to find your content i know you probably have seen these

Things before and you’re like but they aren’t working you got to be consistent you got to keep doing these things this is this is a revolving door this is a revolving set of a list of things that as you go down you go back up to the top again and you keep working

Your way through it okay and you just want to keep building up as you go then after you uh you kind of find ways for people to find your stuff of course the next thing is how to make sure that they stick around and so i as you’re broadcasting of course

As you’re having things happening be personable right unless you are a pro elite streamer uh with all the best stuff uh use some crazy glue to their seats and then they cannot leave ha got em no i but unless unless they’re coming for an extremely interesting or extremely exclusive content on your channel

They’re coming for you they’re they’re they’re going to your channel to watch your channel to see what you do with the content that you have and as a result you need to be that person that they are interested in uh part of that means that you need to talk

You really need to talk i know you’ve heard this before but seriously guys i walk into so many channels where uh it’ll be you know people will be will be sitting around playing a video game you know they’ll be they’ll be playing their fps and it’ll be well that was weak

Oh hey someone said hi my channel five minutes ago what happened oh and it’s and it’s one of those things where if if you are leaving those spaces open it is not fantastic all right you want to make sure that there is content there right

I know it was scary right you you heard that silence there i speak i i used to do radio before i did broadca before i did uh online broadcasting and if i hear more than two seconds of silence that is dead air to me and that is a

Terrifying notion and even doing that for a little bit hurt me inside cut scenes as ziggy gamma mentioned totally understandable if you are if you’re playing a story based game where there’s a cutscene going on um don’t interrupt it don’t try to don’t try to get in front of it but do

Try to commentate on it right uh if it’s a if it’s a particularly poignant moment for example i just played through the last of us part two and there’s some moments where i think it was more powerful for me to not talk uh that’s an imp that’s a

Perfectly fun thing to do just don’t make it a habit of everything else right um if people wanted to just watch the if people just wanted to watch cut scenes in your game uh they would just go watch a playthrough on on youtube right this is a live format and they

Want to hear your live reactions to these things and to not do so uh kind of betrays the sort of format if that makes sense uh be kinda lurkers don’t if someone if you see your viewer uh on number tick up but no one’s talking in your chat

Don’t try to talk to them specifically just talk say things about the game that you’re playing say things that happen in your day say talk about what you had for lunch like just just fill the space with nonsense right talk to the chat in general you can ask them questions open-endedly

Like how’s your day what do you feel about uh broccoli uh what you know uh you know should i be using this gun or this gun and then maybe talk about like what the advantages and disadvantages of that could be but do not try to say hello you came

Into my channel please i’m so lonely because they will not want to talk to you anymore and they will probably leave uh conversely on that don’t wait to talk don’t wait until that viewer’s number ticks up to talk and i’m saying i know that sounds kind of contradictory compared to you

Compared to each other but if you keep talking to people as you go along even though their people aren’t there when people someone rolls into the channel they feel like they’ve joined something when the when it’s dead silence when they come in they feel like they’re waiting for something

And those are two very different feelings they want to feel like it’s an active place like it’s an inviting place like it’s an energetic place um if there is no sound coming from you or no like action coming from you then it is a very passive and again i’m

Just going to youtube now bye see you later please otherwise social media once again keep banging that drum i make you even if you don’t do it right now make yourself an account with all the brand names that you use all right i i have shadow temple pretty much locked

Down on everything and those that don’t i’m in curling litigation for no that’s not true yet uh but you really do want to try to pick up those uh those names sooner rather than later and then as soon as you start kind of get into a groove stick with it

Uh and then show your viewers that you care if someone is repeatedly coming into your channel uh keep track of the stuff that they’ve been telling you you know if they’ve been telling you about how hard their job is uh you know next time they come in ask

Them about the job uh if it’s their birthday wish them a happy birthday if they’re uh excited about like an upcoming trip ask him about the trip before and after if you need to keep a list of things like uh like a creep that’s okay because they’re

Telling you those things and you want to make sure that you remember them right um there’s a little bit of kind of fake friendness in there but it doesn’t have to be fake sometimes you i mean you keep track of all your friends uh birthdays on facebook and do nothing

Else with facebook right same thing with your with your viewers you want to make sure you keep track of some of those things so that they feel like they really are at home even if you even if you try to remember them yourself that’s fine but it’s sometimes

Easier to keep track of those things on something physical i and the biggest thing and i know again broken record but be reliable and consistent people humans human beings human the human race enjoys are they’re creatures of habit they’re creatures of ritual and tradition and they want things to be the

Same and they don’t like it when things are different uh and as a result you need to make sure that you are someone that they can find right if you know before uh before the the the really kind of upsurge of the internet people watch their nightly news people

Watch their uh their tonight shows and whatnot right and every night they would hit that up or their their uh twitch poor twitch rituals um they would hit up things like you know wheel of fortune or things like that that was that was the thing that they

Did when they ate dinner or before they went to bed or while they were eating lunch at work they had this thing that they did become that thing that that person does for me i stream it not every night at 9 00 p.m eastern except the past couple days but that’s

Beside the point but as a result over the course of six years people have understood that that’s what i’m going to stream and that’s when uh they should expect me to be live and i’m consistent about consistency right don’t i’m very consistently late it’s is what i am that’s what cunning dolphin is

Alluding to but um as long as you’re as long as people can reliably find you in that same spot they’re gonna want to mark they’re gonna be more inclined to come back doesn’t mean they will just means that they have they’re like oh yeah good old good old shadow is definitely

Going to be live at this time and if uh even if all else falls and or falls apart and nothing else works i still have this ability to go back there and watch that and that feels good for for viewers i know it’s not always fun you may not always want to stream

Uh especially if you’re trying to keep that schedule be like oh i had a long day at work and it’s not good one thing i always recommend go live first hit that live button try it for a bit give it a half hour if you’re not feeling it after that half hour stop

It’s okay just tell the viewers sorry i’m really exhausted tonight i’ll i’ll try this again next time and you just want to get back up on that horse later um if you are if you don’t go live then there is no chance of that working right

Kind of uh you know you’ll miss 100 of the shots you don’t take mental health days are certainly important and you want to make sure that you are taking the breaks that you need in that but it really it’s amazing how many times where i have not felt like

Streaming i got why i went live and i sat down and i started talking and as soon as i did i felt so much better like i i just got into the groove of things and i felt a lot better as a result even if i had to cut the stream short

Later maybe i like felt great for like an hour or two and then i was like oh and then i kind of passed out by the end then i’ll just cut down the stream early but at least i had a good hour or two beforehand

Right um it does feel pretty good it is some something you kind of want to focus on if you can though so if uh if you’re going through all that you’re like well i’m still you know just not quite getting the three viewers with that 50 followers and it’s just tough

Man i just can’t quite get there it’s okay to not be an affiliate on twitch i want to lead with that before we get into any of the other nitty gritty stuff it’s okay to not hit these milestones or to you know to get to partner on twitch and things like that

Do what works for you and if you can’t like put in the additional time or the reviewing and you just want to have some fun playing some video games and maybe people watch uh it’s okay to not not have to shoot for these things there are advantages

To uh to not being an affiliate and we’ll talk about those a little bit later but i personally i am under the or based on my personal experiences being an affiliate has given me a lot more than not being an affiliate but it doesn’t mean that it’s for everyone and that’s okay

But if you are getting stuck on these things you’re like but i really want to be an affiliate but it’s just not working out uh be willing to check out your stuff right evaluate uh your current position where you’re at where your stats are going

Uh how the growth is going as a result on those things uh and uh make sure that you’re uh you’re looking at your content in a constructive manner don’t be like well you know obviously i’m not growing because my face is poopy and my content is poopier

And there therefore i’m poop like don’t don’t do that right it’s not it’s not helping anyone it’s not helping use least of all um try to look with a critical eye and if you can’t do it yourself find somebody that you trust who can also do it and whether or not you’d

Enjoy that stuff right and just watch your stuff man if i know it that’s a very uncomfortable thing people don’t like hearing their own voice i like hearing my own voice i mean come on listen to it it’s great uh but but do watch your stuff and try to get a feel for

Whether or not you’d enjoy your stuff because if you don’t enjoy your stuff why would somebody else enjoy your stuff right and that’s not that’s not like a like a a gotcha question there it’s a genuine question of would people still enjoy the stuff that you’re putting out if i

Or even if you’re not personally uh connected to it and i’ll admit i actually do create content for something other someone other than myself that is not for me and that’s okay it’s okay to make stuff that isn’t for you maybe you are a family channel streamer

But you like going off and watching some bojack horsemen after you’re done uh streaming more power to you but make sure that someone is enjoying it beyond or in order to help yourself grow you also of course want to make sure you’re able to like within life to commit the time uh

To all of this to make this happen without uh causing harm to your life if you are working 12-hour shifts a day and you’re coming home to a wife and three kids and you’re like sorry wife and three kids i need to go and stream now for

Seven hours so i can then become an affiliate and make three dollars a month uh that that is a painful experience i know you’re you’re trying to go in the grind and you’re really trying to make your make something of yourself but like it’s none of that none of this is worth

Like blowing yourself out trying to make this all work and take it from someone who uh in the past 24 hours has about done about 18 hours of content uh it is not always a comfortable experience and i have the good fortune of having a very supportive partner

And a very uh hazy dog right now because he just got fixed uh that are supporting me in my current endeavors not your everyone’s home life is a little bit different and everybody’s responsibilities as a result are a little bit different and you got to make sure that you are

Keeping yourself safe on all of that and also with you when it comes to your viewers and this is actually something that will help you in uh becoming an affiliate ironically don’t tell your viewers that you’re trying to push for affiliate don’t put it in your title don’t put it

In your uh go live notification don’t like put it on your screen just just push for affiliate don’t you know try to push for the growth that allows affiliate to happen um if you keep telling people that and that that sort of narrative sticks for weeks and months

That starts to get people worn down and it feels like the the little bit of support they can provide to you is not enough and when you’re in a place where you only have like maybe one or two other viewers beside yourself uh even scaring off one of those people is not ideal

So just keep trying to focus on the growth and the quality of the content before you try to be like all right we’re in a game the system folks i need you to show up on sunday tuesday thursday friday at approximately 4 p.m to make sure that happens right

Do you have to use giveaways to get people to tune in at first no i would say uh no you you don’t have to do it uh to me and this i i i speak from a place of privilege and i i do realize that um giveaway follows and views are empty

Follows and views so extremely rarely have i ever run a giveaway on my channel where someone came back after the fact um to like someone came back after the fact when i wasn’t doing another giveaway if that makes sense and so maybe if you’re really trying to shoot for that affiliate initially

And you’re like i just need those numbers you just need a little bit more sure maybe maybe you’re one or two streams off from hitting that three viewer average toss a giveaway or two in there that’s okay but if you’re looking for genuine growth um focus

On and this actually is something that i i tend to do focus if you’re gonna do giveaways on audience retention rather than audience uh rather than audience gaming so like putting out giveaways on your discord and things like that where you are you are specifically trying to address your already present audience

Will make them feel more attached to you as opposed to some people using like bots to reach out and find giveaway or channels that are just kind of you know fish for giveaways that are happening around twitch and then just collecting prizes as they go it happens and it’s not cool man

Uh can you talk about the benefits of using a face cam as you stream certainly i we’ll we’ll cover that in a second i don’t think i have anything in here about facecams um when i started streaming back in 2014 i did not use a facecam

And i did not use a facecam for the first two years of my stream i think i grew up to about uh 25 viewer average 30 somewhere about there uh depending on the day um and i was feeling pretty strong and mighty about that uh you know not too

Bad for someone who only streamed three hours a night and uh i at the time i was i was never really into the idea of the face cam uh and i i think i was to this day i think i could still pull it off just because i kind of have that radio

Background right um if the the advantage of the face cam and why i love it as much as i do is i can do things that are non-verbal to still add an element of personality to my stream right unfortunately i tend to have a bit of a dead face i’m a

Voice and face for radio right but if something’s happening in game and i’m like or like or you know genuine terror or fear or excitement or things like that being able to do things like that really add a lot of personality to the channel right it doesn’t mean they have to do it

Every day and doesn’t mean you have to use it but all of those non-verbal cues are really important and are really attractive for the human brain to see if that makes sense if people if people are not seeing that face you have to work doubly as hard to make sure that the

Commentary you’re providing injects your own voice and your own personality to the point where people feel like they still know you as a person um i i started streaming with a green screen i never looked back um doesn’t mean you have to use one you don’t have to have a great

Uh face cam just one that shows you well enough that people can see what’s going on in your world just one thing you should try to do as if you do try to implement at facecam try not to look bored like try try to make sure that you occasionally look at the camera

That you’re like uh that you are being kind of emotional and active in your space you don’t have to like jump around and like really get into it i just don’t look like you’re sitting on your couch playing video games don’t be like thanks for the fall please because

People are going to be really tired of that over time right it’s a red screen that was that was a joke cunning dolphin that was not a real screen um but yeah just being able to engage with the face a whole lot more also if you want a moment of silence and

You don’t want to talk but you still want to have character on that stream going like as opposed to having all that happen without a face cam on is going to be a lot more powerful right i can talk i can i can be quiet and still be funny in

Those instances as was mentioned before uh with regards to like cutscenes you can react visually to a cut scene without interrupting it and people can enjoy that sort of stuff whereas if you do not have a face cam and you go away and it’s just your game

It means that if there’s an uh if there’s a cutscene or thing going on you are silent and you are out of that space there is there is no input from you happening whatsoever and you are no longer existing right and until you speak again there is none of your personality being

Thrown into that just something to consider as you go along these are awesome questions by the way guys i want to keep answering them i also want to keep moving but please if you have questions be sure to ask them i will give you my best uh my best answer from the

From the years of experience that i’ve had it isn’t always the answer but it’s what has worked for me something i was rated 500 people his response was all right and ignore jed that’s it’s okay to have the chill vibe stream but when there are 1.5 million chill vibe streams

Uh and all of them have two viewers you understand why people might be looking for something a little bit more if that makes sense anyway so uh you know say you’re trying to keep track of these stress uh these stats and things you’re like what’s

How do i how do i hold on to this stuff this is exhausting uh how do i know what i’m growing right my my follow account’s going up my viewership’s staying the same or vice versa my viewership is going up but my follower account is increasing what’s happening here uh

Going to your stream manager and uh checking out the channel analytics page is going to be your best friend there is so much information there that you can use in order to determine what exactly is going on with your channel at a given time what games are being effective for the

Things that you do which things are not uh what your average viewership is this is great stuff to look at after your your stream is done not during because if you keep looking at stuff during well during either like two scenarios are gonna happen one your viewership is going down or

It’s staying the same in which case you’re like your energy goes down and you’re not necessarily feeling the stream two the viewership goes up in which case you’re like aha now i’m ready to entertain but you were waiting for the viewership to go up to entertain and that’s not so good

So something to consider as you’re as you’re kind of building that up make sure that you are looking at stats after streams and not necessarily during i look at all the all the views during the stream i do i do i do i hate it i’m a

Gosh dang hypocrite and i know it don’t do what i do do as i say don’t do as i do i’ve had a lot of mental anguish over that over the years don’t do it if you’re trying to go for that affiliate you do have to keep in mind on the 30-day

Rolling window easiest way to keep track of that twitch has a 30-day uh the last 30 days option that you could just click on and it shows you the past 30 days of streams that you’ve had um people have asked me in the past uh shadow you know i’m trying to get that

Three viewer average uh do i if i’m not streaming on a date does that mean it’s set to zero that day and the answer is no they only keep or in that 30-day average that they’re looking for they are uh they’re actually only checking these days that you streamed

And not the days that you did so don’t worry about that um the only thing other thing i was going to mention because i i didn’t i realized that i didn’t talk about it a lot i talked a lot about you know viewer retention and things like that and maybe

Someone’s really good at that but they’re like oh but shadow i can’t really do seven streams a month and eight hours in that month if you can’t hit those numbers and maybe it’s just a temporary thing maybe it’s not something that’s gonna last forever for you in in terms of like

I i’ll have more free time later if you can’t hit eight hours a month streaming as a hobby may not necessarily be for you in this moment and that’s the the only reason for that is that streaming demands a lot of time from you and as you grow bigger it will only

Demand more from you it the work does not cease when you get bigger it only increases in volume and as a result you are going to need a need that time to throw in this big bad time sync to make your channel work uh and so if you can’t get those eight hours

In stream which just might not be for you man it’s okay it’s all right we don’t we don’t blame you life is tough life is hard you gotta have a job you gotta do other things just try your best to get at least uh try your best to at least get those

Affiliate requirements at all times okay so let’s jump ahead a little bit here let’s say you went through you you followed all vocal shadows advice and suddenly now you are an affiliate you hit the points uh and now everything’s good what’ll happen if once you do it uh complete all

Those achievements is within a couple of hours or days typically is from what i’ve seen uh twitch will send you an email they also put a notification on your on your stream manager that says hey welcome to the next step of your life uh on twitch

You are now you are now leveled up to twitch affiliate you’re like yeah here we go job career uh ninja what go watch out here i come i sure there’s there’s a few things you need to do before that though right you’re on your way in you’re getting up

There but now you get to start the process of onboarding yay paperwork speaking of which that’s number one thing you gotta do when you onboard is an extensive amount of paperwork because surprise you are signing up for a job and not a job in the fun way or an employee with

Uh benefits and such but a job in the sense that uh someone will throw money at you and then you have to keep track of everything else that especially in the us that still entails a decent bit of paperwork especially when it comes to taxation remember that part i mentioned earlier

Where you can go to jail for streaming this is that part if you don’t keep track of this stuff keep track of this stuff please anyway uh there are four steps of the onboarding process that you have to do in order to become an affiliate if you

Don’t do these four steps you don’t you get to become affiliate simple stuff enough uh the first one step one i didn’t really i didn’t really put up a slide for because it’s actually pretty simple they’re just asking for basic information like name and address and stuff like that

So that they have a record of who is the owner of the affiliate channel the second one all right and we’ll actually yeah i’ll hit the third one first because the second one is a little bit more involved the third one is the tax interview this

Is if you were to if you’ve ever done uh contract work for somebody before uh this form right here is gonna look very familiar to you which is the old w-9 in the u.s uh what this means is that you are giving information to uh to actually work your way through

Um to become on their you know to allow to be paid essentially by this company that you are working with right i’m sorry it’s it’s the class of w-9 i’ve signed a dozen of these in the past year i have a lot of side gigs guys um

The general gist of it is that the i o the uh the company that you’re working for needs to report the income the revenue that they’re giving to you as an independent contractor and uh the irs needs to know about that stuff so that when it comes to tax time

That you that they know that you owe taxes on that money no you can’t avoid this no you can’t say well i’m just uh i’m a sovereign citizen no you can’t do those things right does this also apply to non-us streamers yes not this form in particular this is the us form

But your own uh country appropriate tax forms will also apply this is also by the way not the exact form that you will have to use on uh on amazon they have their own just kind of entry forms that you fill in but this this is effectively the same

Sort of information that they are going to need whether it be or it’s going to be things like your your full actual factual name um it’s going to be if you have a business name which some of you might some of you don’t that’s totally fine

Most of you don’t i should say also fine um for the most part you’re gonna have to determine what sort of uh setup you are if you don’t know what uh that third section there is you are a sole proprietor that’s that’s the gist of that if you don’t

Know what the rest of those are you are an individual sole proprietor or single member lclc and what that just means is that you are working as a singular identity and you should be taxed as such totally fine vast majority of streamers out there in the world are themselves

Sole proprietors or they’ve set up an llc for themselves uh things that also need you actually you do have to put in your address you have to put in your phone your your full okay you know places that people can locate you and send you mail

About the taxes that you owe uh you also need to put in some sort of uh tax identifying number uh so if you are in the us that’s your social security number or if you have an ein uh you can do that as well um if you are

Not in uh if you’re not in the us you have other things you have to fill out a vast majority of countries have some sort of tax identifying uh like id or number or something like that and you do need to use those in order to

Uh in order to actually apply if you’re under the age of 18 ask an adult for help yes i know i know dear 15 year old who’s trying to stream without his parents knowing who’s like i finally got some viewership and i really want to make money off of this

But i don’t want to clue them in because i know they won’t understand and they’ll think it’s a scam and i don’t want to i don’t want to keep them in this you need your social security number and until you turn 18 you need to have your parents involved in the process

It’s a legal matter you can’t touch it otherwise i’m not going to give any further uh like legal tax advice beyond that there will be some other tax stuff that i’ll talk about at the end just from my own personal experience i cannot even remotely speak to the

To what uh the process is for out of or out of the country uh participants as well just that you will have to do similar things this is still revenue this is still income and however your country treats your income is how you need to treat this this is no different than getting

A a quick job at the like uh like a seasonal place or things like that where you’re just working part-time and earning some cash that way in fact even worse in that a lot of places will withhold uh if you’re an employee of a place they’ll withhold taxes from your paycheck so you

Just get the paycheck after the fact the twitch doesn’t do that so we’ll talk more about that later so that’s that’s a big part and that kind of scares a lot of people but it’s also extremely important that you know that’s that’s what’s going to come up when you when you’re starting

To set this up also if this tax interview is the place that people get stuck on the most if you do not fill out this tax information correctly that interview is going to eventually fail and you’ll have to redo the entire process again not hitting all the achievements again

But you will have to do your paperwork over again and that can take a couple of days to to be detected is wrong so please make sure that you’re filling it out correctly the first time don’t try to kind of hum your way through it if you need help

Ask a ask a tax professional or even a lawyer if you really need it all right or if you’re a kid ask your parents please please and yes you will have to redo this every so often as well it’s true so this is the next part here that you

Do need to be aware of here is the twitch affiliate contract i will give you the next three minutes to review it so you understand exactly what you’re getting yourself into as you are uh getting yourself up as an affiliate good we got it great no this is this is a genuine document

Though and i’ll actually post the link of in into chat here what’s fun about this back with my partner workshop um i could not talk about what the contract looks like for partners because partner contracts number one are usually confidential and number two uh differ from one another the nice part

About the affiliate agreement is that it is available publicly online even if or provided by twitch themselves and as a result we can actually discuss various aspects of the contract here um the number one thing as you see on the screen there read your contract before you sign the contract

There are some little getcha or kind of gotchas a little bit here and there that you may not otherwise see if you don’t read it um which we’ll cover um but there will be also things on there that maybe you don’t know about and you really should check

And so uh those are sort of things that you really definitely need to go through before you you uh sign up for this stuff this isn’t like the uh like the twitch terms of service or like the uh the eula’s that you never read on the the various bits of software that

You install and then wonder why all of your information is being sent somewhere uh this this is binding right and if you do something that goes against contract uh you can lose your channel it’s not cool so let’s discuss some of the things that are uh that are specific on the uh

Affiliate contract that i think people don’t necessarily expect for the most part a lot of it is uh is pretty much expected there are a lot of like data privacy things licensing things like things like that making sure that you follow the twitch terms of service as laid out

Um but there are also a few additional pieces that people don’t always necessarily see uh yes also as a disclaimer anything on streamer square cannot be taken as legal advice uh please talk to a lawyer directly i am not a lawyer i am not a lawyer i am not a lawyer

I’m not a lawyer okay but here’s one thing uh here’s one thing that people get caught on pretty frequently which is the live content exclusivity section uh this discusses when you become or the fact that when you become an affiliate whatever you stream on twitch is twitches to

To hold on to for 24 hours after you are done streaming what that means is you cannot take your stream and multi-stream it to other places um if you say for example you you start streaming on twitch and then you also decide to stream on youtube and like facebook

And whatever smoldering remains there are of mixer these days uh and you try to do that all simultaneously that is against your affiliate contract if you exclude twitch from that you are safe but if you include twitch with that you are not safe you can you can have

Your own youtube channel you can have all that rolling away on its own but you have to make sure that twitch content stays on twitch exclusively for at least 24 hours they’re not going to come after you for say you know like clips and little things like that

Where you can like share that on uh on social media and things like that they want to they want to help you make sure you get there but you couldn’t say take the higher the vod for the you know the recording of your stream afterward the fact and

Immediately throw it up on youtube or vimeo wherever else you might toss it up um that catches a lot of people especially people are starting off who are trying to do the kind of multi-stream uh setup where they’re like i’m just gonna cast a wide net and hope that i get a

Gaming audience on one of them um once you sign the affiliate contract you’re kind of married you have to hold on to it all right little uh little mono partnered when it comes to uh when it comes to platforms at that point when it comes to live content

Other things uh i think sometimes people get are caught off guard by this as well uh the subscriptions on your channel when people uh subscribe to your channel you know you get uh they pay for 4.99 uh which is prayer you know 49 499 usd uh they give themselves a

Subscription to your channel which means that you get um or that they get emotes and other sort of advantages to the channel which we’ll talk a little bit a little bit more later subscriptions are subscription revenues split 50 50 between you and twitch so in kind of very blunt practical terms

Uh if someone or someone uh subscribes for five dollars you get 250. uh there are other tiers of uh subscriptions too uh you know the 10 uh tier you get five dollars 25 tier you get 12.50 which means that uh yeah also any fees that uh come up with

It as well whether it be um you know uh taxes and things of that nature too which can come up um but yeah and any fees that are that are accrued through uh dealing which prime is now fees that is true that is true i by through transactions unfortunately

Do uh kind of cut into that revenue again as well it’s why getting a lot more uh subscriptions is uh is a pretty nice thing but having just a few uh it doesn’t really build up too much and that’s just something you really do need to think

About as you’re going along with that um just know that those subscriptions uh twitch has taken a lot off the top of that thing uh let’s see here what else we have here uh this one this one scares some people sometimes so if he’s as high as four dollars i

Remember exalt i used that for one of the first subscribers or first channels i ever subscribed to shout outs to snarfy bobo uh he yeah i there was there’s some pretty nasty uh fees on those so don’t always expect you’re gonna get 250 even then out of the subscriptions that you are receiving

This one uh sometimes scares people and they’re like ah if i don’t make a hundred dollars in a year then twitch will take my account away and then i’ll take all my money this class is in here uh to pretty much uh wipe uh completely and totally inactive accounts from twitch

Um my guess is that there’s probably a decent bit of uh legal kind of hurdles they have to climb if they have to hold on to a lot of uh just kind of a lot of low change on twitch for more than one year at a time

In terms of revenue and so if you are an affiliate on twitch and you do not stream or you do not make any sort of substantial activity as has been as been described on your account for 12 months straight so one full year uh they will actually uh just cancel your affiliate contract

And any money that you’ve made in that space or in that space that you have not collected upon and we’ll talk about the hunt why a hundred dollars in a little bit uh twitch will actually just send you the rest of what you’ve earned

Minus 25 so if you have if you have 75 dollars in your account and you just disappear off the planet for a year uh they will they will close out your account and uh yeah if you had fifty dollars you’ll actually get twenty five of it back

To which will then charge you twenty five dollars if you had twenty five dollars in there they will get zero dollars back if you had zero dollars in there and this these people have asked about this no twitch does not charge you 25 anyway they’re just subtracting it for

Whatever balance you had in there to start if there’s no money in there to start they’re not going to necessarily they’re not going to care and they’re not going to charge you for it it does scare people sometimes when they see that i just wanted to be clear about that

But this is why you read your contract so please read it when before you sign it when you go on board and if you have any questions about it don’t ask me ask someone who you can pay to give an official legal opinion on things

So that way you can feel a little bit more certain about this um space magic storm asked can you alternate uh streaming platforms yes if you if you went and streamed on twitch and then the next day you went and streamed on youtube but you did not

Stream on twitch at the same time that is perfectly fine uh twitch cannot or cannot control content that does not happen on twitch um they’ll sometimes moderate based on a content that’s on twitch but they won’t like cancel your they won’t cancel your contract for that unless there are stipulations in a

Specific contract that you have which is not contained within the affiliate contract all right the amount of money making off the interest must be insane all right so once you get through the the tax stuff the uh the the the contract you get into kind of some of the more fun stuff right

I what you get you say so talk to twitch about how you want to get paid when you eventually do get paid uh in the us you have five different options that you can choose from uh those include a direct deposit just like maybe if you uh work at a job where

You get uh where you get normal wages uh you will just get at a certain time each year or each month uh a direct deposit into your bank account uh whatever you choose there money by wire if you uh like to live uh ferociously and dangerously and you like to have uh

Some like transunion stuff or uh or western union i think it is sorry not trans union um and you you tend to work on the the money by wire sort of things you have higher fees as a result of getting that money but it might be easier for you depending on where you

Are to receive that money uh a little more anonymously uh you can also uh do paypal i do paypal paypal is super easy um because that means that you can just kind of wire everything through paypal and uh then you can have that then transfer over to

Various bank accounts or pay off the debt and things like that you can also go for the classic check by mail if you’re like hey you know i just want to have that sweet sweet twitch check in my hands that’s totally fine you can sign up for that it will take longer for

That to process however just so you know and then the last option if you’re like i don’t really want the money yet uh is you can hold payments right you can just uh you can just have twitch hold on to the money and then eventually you can decide later

To uh res or set this again in which case then you can get the money there where’s the cash option where twitch just sends you an on an unmarked envelope full of cash not quite not not uh not not the safest thing in the world right

Can i get it in like uh 300 pennies fourteen dimes and uh thousand forty seven nickels please no take the check to your bank and then and then make some poor a poor uh poor bank teller sweat it out huh don’t make twitch do it they’re not gonna do it for you

It’s true though paypal is not a bank don’t do don’t hold much too much cash and paypal i frequently uh will keep a little bit in paypal so i can do quick uh like business transactions but then i will put everything else in my bank accounts which actually accrue interest as

Opposed to paypal which typically uh does not and that is uh that that’s typically something you kind of want to stick to again not a tax professional i’m not i’m not a person like that so do what you need to do paypal is pretty handy but as always

If you’re confused or unsure about any of these things you’re like i don’t know what works best for me talk to a local tax or business professional those sort of things are pretty handy as well right uh thank you that’s actually a fantastic thing uh monday is here on streamer square

There’s a uh there’s a stream uh where an actual cpa will come in and talk to you uh about various things that’s a very good thing to check out please do so i i’ve seen uh i’ve done i’ve been to workshops and uh panels uh hosted by people like that and

It’s so handy it’s so useful to hear all right so you did all the stuff you filled all the paperwork you dotted all the eyes crossed all the tees kissed all the lips now you’re here right money now yes the answer is it kind of but there’s

Still you still have to earn it right you still have to convince people that you’re you’re worth uh giving this money to uh there are various options uh in kind of avenues for you to earn revenue on twitch and those include things like number one bits bits are the on the

Uh on platform currency that uh viewers can either purchase or earn uh via the review of uh via either surveys or uh various uh specific advertisements um er whenever a viewer purchases or earns that currency they can then share it to your channel uh that cheering uh process converts the bits into

Revenue for your channel and cannot be returned back into bits unless you purchase more bits um in that sense uh in that sense in that sense every bit that you uh that you receive as a streamer is converted into one us dollar cent uh so if you get 100 bits you get one

Dollar if you get a thousand bits you get at ten dollars if you got a million bit you get the idea right just divide it by a hundred and you’ll figure out where you’re at um pretty handy stuff uh you know compared to someone giving you just a

Regular old tip via maybe like streamlabs or something like that um there’s a bigger cut on twitch’s side for that when they when the kid when the viewer actually purchased them but i when they give you the bits the nice part is when they give you 100 bits you they

Know that that 100 bits is going straight to you right the uh the cut happens on the purchasing side instead of the redeeming side which is kind of nice and again provides uh chargeback uh protection so like if someone’s like here’s a thousand dollars and then just kidding i actually want it

Back um that’s a pretty nice thing to to be like nope sorry you kind of you kind of already did it and you can’t get it back now um because the twitch focuses on the actual purchasing side as opposed to the redemption side uh yes bits versus cheering uh bits are the currency

Cheering is the verb the action of sending or sending bits to a person right yes affiliates do have access to the bounty board in limited uh supplies it’s not uh for it’s certainly not out to everybody but there i believe they’re i’m pretty darn certain there are a few affiliates

That do have it how much for an example does a person pay for 100 100 bits depending on where what country and what taxes are applicable um i believe the the base price for 100 bits is 1.40 which if you if you think about it from

That perspective is a pretty hard cut on twitch’s part right but the uh when it comes to purchasing bits that uh it is one of those things where the less you buy the less you get uh or the less value you get the further you go along

Down the line and you purchase larger and larger bins and you get your costco sized uh pile of bits that uh that cut goes down over time right um you just so typically it’s best to purchase piles of bits uh and then use them uh slowly as opposed in

You know or incrementally over the course of several streams as opposed to just buying 100 bits at a time because that’s not so good subscriptions subscriptions are of course the uh kind of lifeblood of most channels because it is the most consistent uh payment model that a streamer can receive

Uh once again anytime uh somebody subscribes to the channel uh in a normal sense uh you that is a monthly recurring charge on their credit card or something like that um where you and then you’ll get half of that and twitch gets the other half uh those could also include things like

Twitch prime or was it called uh it is prime gaming or something like that nowadays i think they just changed the name very recently or at least the the service of getting games as a result of being twitch prime uh has a new name but the the the idea appeals still

Or applies the same if you have amazon prime and you connected to your twitch account you can get a free subscription that you can hand out to a streamer who then receives the usual cut on a 499 uh revenue cut for that so you get you know you’re kind of 250

Or somewhere more or less by getting that uh there are also gifted subscriptions which also work like one month of a subscription that you can then uh receive revenue on ads are kind of a slightly more recently thing added to affiliates and is bit of a sticking

Point for some affiliates some are for some streamers some streamers don’t really really really really really hate the idea of being uh having advertisements run on their channel it’s just a reality of the platform that um if you are if you are streaming on the channel it or on twitch

It does cost twitch money to do and twitch wants to make money back and then some which is why they’re there uh they their ads are paid on what’s called a cpm basis if you’ve never done stuff like youtube before the gist of it is that um different ads

May have different prices but uh generally you’ll get let’s say like three and a half dollars cpm what that means then is that every for every thousand views that you uh that your channel accrues of a 30-second ad you’ll receive 3.50 what that means is that every one viewer

Not a whole lot of ad revenue coming in but if you have a lot of ads or a lot of viewers that number starts to balloon up over time it’s also why for affiliates having a lot of ads running is usually not very advantageous and typically tends to scare people away

You have the opportunity to run ads on your channel but it doesn’t necessarily always mean that that’s going to be useful for you excuse me i there is a feature for subscriptions by the way that you can enable as a as a broadcaster that if you uh that subscribers can actually avoid watching

Ads on your channel um it does mean that you don’t get that ad revenue from uh from those viewers but it does mean that people like you more and you’re in a place as an affiliate where you need more people to like you more than uh necessarily earning those extra two

Cents a month from your ad playing right otherwise you know you can earn revenue extensions there are these add-ons that you can add onto your stream that uh viewers can throw bits at uh which then usually the person who made the extension gets a little bit of a cut and then

After that uh you or you receive the rest uh things like crowd control and things of that nature where people can pay to uh change the outcome of a particular game is a pretty frequent occurrence on twitch and it’s a pretty fun thing you can check out the extensions thing on your

Stream manager and see what works for you and the last thing that i have here is pretty uncommon but there is this thing called the bounty board um the idea being that the uh the pretty much twitch it’s an it’s kind of an invite-only thing uh where twitch will send you

Limited little one-off uh sponsorships for various streams you’re gonna you can choose to accept a bounty or not and uh twitch will tell you what you need to do whether it be uh showing off a product a service a movie a video a video game and you have to

Show it for a certain amount of time and uh based on that based on how much viewership you have during that time you will be paid on a certain scale uh there’ll be a max payment uh that you can earn uh based on the viewership that you have and if you have

Fewer um if you have fewer viewers than that it will work you’ll cut down on the uh the amount of money you get proportional to how lower how much lower the viewership was from their target point you don’t have to worry about the bounty board too often as an affiliate because

You have to have pretty good viewership in order to even uh make that worthwhile but it is technically something you can earn as an affiliate so let’s say you start building up that revenue and everything’s feeling great you’re like yeah i got money now

What do i do now uh do i get paid now i so this is how twitch pays out your money once you earn a hundred dollars of revenue on twitch that is when they’re gonna begin the process of paying you uh starting at the end of any given

Month so at the end of my er at the end of the month twitch checks to see if how much money you how much revenue you’ve gained and if it’s 100 or more then they’re going to start the process of paying it out to you that happens on like i said net 15

Uh at the beginning of this workshop i mentioned that um and that net 15 means that you will receive uh revenue 15 days after the end of that previous month so let’s say tim123 makes 200 um throughout august and uh that was their first time streaming as affiliate they’re like wow

Look at all this money i got i end of august hits they’ve been building up all before and then twitch will will give them we’ll give them the money however they uh asked to receive money uh starting 15 days after so if you did it in august

More than likely you’ll be paid around september 15th um yes uh morag’s absolutely correct it used to be so much longer it used to be like i think net 45 for partners net 60 for affiliates you had to wait two months after you made that money uh to receive it which was

That was a long wait now let’s say you’re starting off and you didn’t have a lot or you didn’t necessarily hit that hundred dollar marker do they just keep your money and that’s it no uh instead what it means is that think of it as kind of like uh like a little

Like bucket right if you don’t let’s say you made uh 30 in uh july and then like 50 in august that bucket now has eighty dollars which is still not enough to get paid out yet but the bucket keeps accumulating uh let’s say then in september you have the eighty dollars uh

Piling up and you earn another fifty dollars from people in september and now all of a sudden you have enough to get over that hundred hump in which case then twitch will uh pay out uh if i do my math correctly 130 to you in october usually around october 15th

So yeah they’ll just hold on your money and they’ll probably make money off of it uh but they’ll then eventually give it to you the big game of course is to try to earn 100 a month so that way you get paid every month um it’s a nice feeling but

It doesn’t happen for everyone okay so let’s talk about uh how you are going to convince people to pay for the things in your world right and a part big part of that is making sure you actually provide them some sort of reward other than just the sweet sweet

Uh rewarding of uh making sure people feel comfortable so uh when it comes to that there are plenty of different things that you can do and i’m actually going ahead and bring up my uh dummy account that i have called twitch test or shadow test this is an account that i

Uh that i made as an affiliate a few uh months ago and i like to use it for uh workshops like these just to kind of let you guys follow along to where we’re going right i’m never getting the money from the secret affiliate channel no absolutely not

So this is this is actually an affiliate channel that i own uh and i’m happy to show you everything that i have on it because i don’t care about this channel other than for streamer square um you can see of course i go to channel analytics i have nothing here because i

Haven’t streamed here in a while but you can of course uh scroll through and check back previous months you can also uh go back and see kind of an accumulation of what you’ve done so far and uh just have it update and you can see what sort of viewership views

And revenue you’ve earned in that time look at this look at that powerful three dollars and 35 cents that i made on this this bad boy baby but yeah different things that you can see and of course on the revenue page here you can see

How uh it’s kind of divvied up there are lots of different options for how revenue can be earned on the channel and it will split it out into those different sections for you as you go along all right focusing on the main point of why we’re here so

Uh you can of course at any time uh start over your affiliate or your uh onboarding if like let’s say you need to change your address or you want to change your payout setup or something like that you can always start this over and go from there um

You’re also going to view of course view your affiliate agreement at any given time which in this case literally sent it to that public site again um but here’s where we’re really getting into the nitty-gritty of it right uh for subscriptions you have yourself a name

That you can change if you so choose people i don’t think people really ever attach too much value to the names of your subscriptions but you can come up with something cute and fancy and something on brand for yourself if you want to try to name these

A little bit different than just tier one tier two tier three right um emotes though are the lifeblood of twitch and you should absolutely try to make sure that you’re on top of this as soon as you become an affiliate um as soon as you do become an affiliate you

Have access to three emote slots uh on the at the outset that people can immediately jump upon um these affiliate uh slots or these email slots you should definitely try to fill uh this one over here is for tier one uh streamers or tier one uh subscribers

This one’s for tier two or the people who paid ten dollars and this is the one for tier three people who paid twenty five dollars to uh submit an emote you just have to scroll down here and uh you just have to put in an image here um

That has maximum they simplified this way much in the past couple of months here and it’s super nice you just have to make sure that it has a that is a square image and then it fits the uh the guidelines for emotes on twitch um and you could actually if you just

Google that you’ll find it pretty quick and uh that’s a pretty handy way of keeping track of what you can and cannot have as a particular emote make sure that uh that it’s not animated make sure it’s a square shape and then whenever whatever sort of emote you come up with

You do also have to come up with an emote code so that when someone types it out they know what they’re getting um for affiliates you do not get to choose what your emote code is at the front of it my channel here is called shadow test so i’m just labeled as

Shadot or waiting for shadow depending on what your uh what your what your absurdist play knowledge is so in this case i’m gonna do shadow panic in which case i’ll type the code in here uh you can only get up to 20 characters on that thing

And it already sets it up right there where you get uh shadow and then capital p panic it’ll camel case any sort of emote that you add in right and maybe like hey shadow you know cool great you can upload an emote how do i get an emote how do i make an

Email what is the knee mode again you want to focus on making things that uh you you want to make a nice square emote number one number two you want to have an email that uh that people want to use right uh play to emotions play new ideas play the things

That people are going to be excited about inside jokes are fun for your own viewers but make sure that it’s something that other people will be excited to see coming into your channel for the first time um something with uh with something that you know is happy or sad or

Uh there are there are there are a lot of different out or outcomes out there that you can try out or something new but definitely make sure that it’s something that it would appeal to a wide range of people uh now you might be wondering it’s like okay but you have

You know there are cute emotes out there how do i make those well first off learn photoshop if you don’t know it or something like that uh but second off you can pay people to do it right and that is a really solid idea to uh to

Try to get an artist involved in your channel especially once revenue starts rolling in it was the number one mistake that i made of trying to uh depend on ad hoc uh volunteer work or uh depending on my own uh middle and to our pure purely amateurish uh artistic skills

To uh find uh to find somebody who would be willing to do my artwork for me and paying them to do it right it this is it definitely helps to know people networking in this case is extremely handy but you know what else is a good place

To check for people like that twitter instagram check uh just search up like twitch emotes and things like that and typically you can find artists with a with a solid track record who are willing to uh take your money and turn it into emotes that you want

Uh typically i’ve paid anywhere from 15 to 70 for an email depending on the level of quality the business of the uh of the artist how fast the turnaround needed to be and uh how what kind of complexity what level of complexity that particular emote had yes uh definitely look at this

Subscriber email guide but as morag mentioned buttholes definitely a big old no any nudity of any kind uh yeah white stuff on face emotes and letters mostly because if you if you make like an alphabet on your stream that means that you can now or people can officially spell whatever

They want with that which is not so cool uh and that’s uh that’s why they try to avoid that too much right as a new uh affiliate once you submit an emote it will take some time for twitch to manually verify when you’re a new uh when you’re

New affiliate anything any new artwork that you submit that uh people have to pay for uh will have to be checked by someone on twitch’s side before it can be released to your channel so if you get an affiliate if you become an affiliate and you’re like alright here i go

10 minutes before the stream starts i’m going to submit my emote why isn’t it here for my first stream come on i that is something that this is something that can take days or even weeks in our present uh climate that we have um and

So be sure to plan for that uh my recommendation is if you’re getting close to being affiliate get them designed in advance so that their you know minute one of being an affiliate you can immediately get those submitted and go on from there more recently uh longer streaming

Affiliates those i believe who have been streaming for 60 days or more um they have the opportunity to actually um excuse me they actually have the opportunity to have them automatically submitted where it’s like you have to ask for forgiveness more than for permission uh that way you you pretty much get it

Pretty much as fast as twitch’s uh like database can update and it’s pretty nice yes new copyrighted material when it comes to your emotes does it mean that uh partners and people who get uh emotes automatically is submitted don’t get away with that i yeah people get away with it all the

Time but pete don’t do it because there is a chance yes is the update up to the owner that material to remove it and protect their trade enforce their trademark um as opposed to uh twitch’s intent to try and police it all themselves right so uh if you’re gonna use something don’t

Say anything but seriously don’t don’t in for like don’t fight them on that because uh if you go around and you start using like fortnite logos free emotes ford asked me like hey stop all right so we got through emotes uh subscription emails are definitely a thing um loyalty badges also come with

Uh subscriber or for subscriptions the longer someone has been uh subscribed to a channel the uh fancier of a a little badge next to their name they can have and those are badges that you need to make yourself typically the the kind of the main play that a lot of streamers have

Is a a rapidly evolving uh badge that you can have over time for me it’s just uh my letters st that i have that uh that will upgrade uh various colors from like white to like wood to stone to bronze to silver to gold to rainbow kind of thing um and that’s something

That you can have you can have pretty much anything you want you only get uh as an affiliate you only get the base one which you can change up along with the two month the three month the six month the nine month and the one year badge

So after that then you have to wait to become a partner to get more than those unlike the uh unlike the um emotes the bad the uh the badges that you need to have actually you need to have three versions of it one that is 18 by 18 pixel one

That’s 36 by 36 one 72 by 72 all the more reason to hire somebody that already knows how to do this stuff um other thing too the badge player is a new thing where you can actually add custom flair to uh to these loyalty badges that uh appear

Or apply when people go for tier two and two three subs it’s a pretty nice and handy little thing and it’s a nice little value add for people who uh subscribe to your channel that way another thing with the emotes before i forget the more uh subscribers that you get

On your channel the more subscriber points that you earn uh you earn more emote slots so uh as a as an affiliate i think you can earn up to five emote slots uh in addition to the ones that you already have uh by having more subscribers um those subscriber points by the way

This is another place where uh the tier two and two three come into play uh if you are tier one you uh if you’re tier one sub you’re providing one sub point to the channel if you’re a tier two sub you are giving two sub points to the channel

If you’re a tier three sub you get six points to the channel instead of five which is a nice little extra bonus it’s not super huge but it is nice uh and then so those points are the ones that actually twitch checks to see whether or not you have earned another emote slide

And once you earn another emote slot for your channel you do not lose it which is a pretty nice little feature so keep that in mind if you’re going on like a gift sub binge or something like that that you can uh keep those emo slots for life

Other things here we can see here this is the ad free viewing part that we talked about i have this checked on my channel you probably should too unless you know that you’re gonna earn a lot of money from the ads um this way you you can give a really

Nice big value add to a subscriber to say hey you don’t like ads on my channel subscribe to my channel and then now you don’t have to watch them anymore fun stuff uh you can also give them other powers too which are pretty nice you can do things like all recordings

Can only be watched by subscribers not a great way to grow um good way to for subscribers though and uh if you are already big uh bits and cheering they you know uh you have uh people can give bits to your channel of course and this is where you can set how many

They can give at a time uh i would recommend putting it above one because i otherwise it means that someone can really spam your ch the crap out of your channel with one dollar um i typically i have i think 10 minimum bits to cheer on mine

And what that allows for me is that i can uh by doing so i can prevent them from uh from spamming too hard because spamming dimes is a little bit harder than spamming pennies right also taking a look at uh at b giving out bits the more bits that a

Viewer gives the more badges that they can earn here as you can see um and these different badges you can see are set up as such um if you want to change up a particular badge you can actually change it from what you see there i do believe

To uh yeah to changing the um changing the batch to something that’s a little bit more appropriate for your brand for me i actually i kind of have a legends of the hidden temple motif for those of you who love that 90s game show like i do

Um and so i actually use uh little team badges for that and that’s super fun um you also when people unlock various badges here uh you also are in an emote that you just hold on to forever and these are accumulative right so if you uh are

If you just give like a thousand bits to the channel you get that badge for as long as you’re on that channel and you get an extra emote that you can upload here so in reality what that means is that instead of just having uh three modes to start with you can

Actually have up to an additional three emotes here that people can earn by getting 1k 5k and 10k uh bits given to you on your channel other things here i going through the cheer stuff hype training leader or high training leader boards just kind of ways of

Attracting people to uh give more money to you hype train is a way of like just kind of chaining things together if there’s a lot of energy happening in the channel it’s a good way of continuing that energy and having more people give for uh some

Little emo uh gifts that they can get uh leaderboards are just bragging rights for people who uh who have given money so far and then the pre-roll ad system uh so no matter what no matter who you are as long as you’re an affiliate or partner uh twitch will always run pre-roll ads

On your channel that means when a person comes into your channel the first thing they’re going to see unless they came in from a raid is an advertisement uh however if you run what are called mid-roll ads on your channel so that is to say there’ll be a button

On your on your uh stream manager that you can hit to uh run an advertisement uh you can actually use that and uh for is a kind of a more recent feature disable pre-roll ads on your channel for a certain amount of time and that’s listed right here for 30

Seconds of an hour if you do a 30-second ad break you get 10 minutes of pre-roll ad-free um and you can go up to a minute and a half of an ad break to get 30 minutes per time so in practice what you could do is you

Could run uh take half hour breaks where you run 90 seconds worth of ads and then nobody has to watch any ads any in the meantime until the next ad break depends on how your content’s set up you can pull that off great you might annoy some people but it

Is a way to do it um and you can actually see on this one my revenue share for mine is in fact three and a half dollars for uh ad revenue not a great uh not a great value for a new streamer but it is there all right any questions about any of

That before we get into the finish or finish line here because i’ve already been going for almost two hours and that is a little extreme but there’s a lot to cover and you guys have been asking a lot of good questions and i want to make sure that i’m not uh leaving anybody

Out here so let’s say you’ve gotten all that set up and you’re you’re feeling high and mighty got your affiliate stuff you got all your your artwork and stuff by the way actually one last thing with the artwork when you hire an artist see if they also do branding

Uh i know it’s fine to do it feels good to just kind of do some slap dash stuff up to a certain point when you’re uh kind of starting off your channel but it it’s a really good idea to try to match up all that branding across platforms and things over time

Um i had a fan of the show who made my logo that you see on that uh this slide right here which i should also bring up so you can see the whole thing and they they they we actually went through several different prototypes of this logo before eventually coming to this

And i love my logo very much and all my stuff is branded with this particular color and aesthetic and it it’s handy to have that people like that sense of professionalism uh that comes with having a consistent theme doesn’t mean they have to have everything around

Um but you do want to make sure that you at least try to connect things together how much geographic artists charge for emotes very much depends on the on the artist and the quality of the content you go to fiverr it’s gonna be a heck of cheap

Right maybe you can get a five dollar emote the emotes that i have typically paid for like the the moon and the the mad duck that you see there which intentionally or the both of them are supposed to be kind of very cartoonish and the one on the right

Supposed to be kind of almost crudely drawn intentionally um they each cost me 30 35 for the for the artist that i worked with um again depending on what sort of emotes you got and who you’re working with can be anywhere from like usually around 15 to 75 dollars is

Around where i’ve seen and please pay your artists uh if you pay your artists good they’re going to treat you good and you should keep doing that as best you can if you don’t uh they are not going to like you very much and they’re not going

To put a lot of effort into that stuff so please do pay your artists and expect to have to pay for the artwork that you get okay you get what you pay for if that makes sense or find a friend who you can mooch off of either way

All right so the last kind of point of this thing here right uh so you got everything set up you got all the artwork you got all this stuff set up you got you got all the the paperwork done you started making revenue can this be my job now

Are we done can we can we just become a career streamer and everything’s good the answer is yes you could but it’s going to take a lot more involved with that and we’re not going to talk all about it here necessarily today but the biggest thing that i think

People forget about and sometimes almost intentionally and like ignorant or like like intentionally ignorantly uh is that all the money that you make on twitch is taxable income and that includes subscriptions that includes bits that includes ad revenue that includes uh if you go to stream labs and set up like your paypal

And people donate to your paypal all of that is income and it’s taxable income as a result and at the end of this at the end of the taxable year you do need to well you do need to chart all that up and you do need to pay off the taxes

Owed for it um you can also of course uh like all that twitch is not going to pay your taxes so you have to absolutely have to keep track of your own stuff and then report it at the end of the year if you make if you make a significant

Amount absolutely pay every quarter i actually this is my first year that i’m paying quarterly on my taxes um but that doesn’t mean you have to do it all the time i up until this year i was more or less just breaking even mostly on streaming i had my own

I had my own day job so i just kind of threw everything back into streaming and most of the expenses that i had especially travel kind of ate up any sort of revenue i made so i didn’t have to necessarily worry about taxes as much

Uh so there is a kind of a penalty you pay if you don’t pay every quarter on those things um but it was so kind of insignificant for me that it didn’t really matter too much if you start making a meaningful amount like a full-time professional amount of

Money yes you do have to you would actually pay your estimated taxes uh estimated income tax every quarter and you can send that off to the to the tax service and they will make sure they have it that’s in the us again seek advice from a tax

Professional or tax software i use uh i use turbo tax for myself i know it’s a nasty company but it does work pretty well yes at the end of the year twitch will send you a document uh called the 1099 for those of you in the us

For other people it will be a slightly different uh document and that 1099 will be what the twitch is reporting based on the information that they have of what they gave you this year that being said it is not accurate and you need to make sure that you were reporting instead the

Money that you actually received in that year okay so if twitch gives you uh a 1099 at the end of 2020 and uh you look at it and you realize that you got paid 300 more on or when you look at the payouts that you received than what

Twitch reported you need to report the additional 300 in addition to that 1099 that you receive 1099 by the way being a form that twitch sends saying hey you made you as an independent contractor made this much according to our records you got to make sure you keep track of that

Uh you need to also make sure that you keep up with the income ad expenses because uh as a business owner as a person of of business that you are as you’re becoming a streamer is that uh you can also offset the amount of income the revenue and profit that you make uh

By the expenses that you’re doing for your job there are very specific things that you can charge as expenses for the for that career you can’t be like yeah you know i got a card because i might drive to conventions eventually no uh but if you have

If you need to purchase equipment for your computer or a new microphone or something like that that is absolutely the sort of things that you can uh deduct as or as a business expense that you can then uh help yourself out with quite a bit come tax time

Again talk to a tax professional i am not a tax professional i cannot provide professional tax advice i can only give provide the advice based on the information and opinions that i have from my personal experience turbo tax is a pretty okay uh like independent contractor uh

Sole proprietor stuff uh it is a pretty good it’s not a bad way to kind of get started if you got some more complicated stuff and you want more information check out your brand your business and or speak to an actual uh local cpa and get uh everything kind of figured out

Here’s the big thing though uh when it comes to trying to make this a job right because people ask this and even when people don’t ask this they’re like front brain is like yeah of course i’m just doing this for fun but also you

Know if i make a little bit of money for it i’ll just make sure i put it back into the stream and everything’s great in the back there’s like i can make this job i can make it i can actually do it right now yeah

It takes a lot of work to turn this into something that uh that is genuinely a powerful enough force to make it a sustainable career vast or a vast vast vast vast majority of streamers never make a career out of this it took me six years to get close i’m

Actually finally at the point and it’s not it’s because honestly it’s not just because my twitch is because of other things that i do around that space that i could potentially do it um but it took me six years to get there and it could take you longer it could

Take you shorter but it’s gonna take a lot of time and it’s gonna take more work than it is for any other job that you probably have done before um if that doesn’t sound fun to you and you still want to try it though that’s a lot of stress to put on

Something that is supposed to be that it hinges on you enjoying the things that you do when you stream if you are in full-on stress and panic mode as you stream it’s going to show and reflect in the content you content you create and that’s not going to go well

For uh growth and making sure that people actually want to support you uh so really do make sure that you are supporting yourself not financially through streaming but mentally and emotionally through streaming if it does become a thing where like you know you are doing pretty well and you’re feeling pretty solid

Sure look through how it’s gonna work for you make sure you got some money saved up and things like that and will be willing to take or if you have people at home make sure that they’re willing to support you throughout that even if you fall on your face

My recommendation and something that i have kept to myself here is that only think of this as a job when you are making job money off of it if you are not making job money off of it when you start or especially at the start don’t consider it a job yet

Work on it build it up think of it as an awesome side hustle or a uh or a fantastic hobby that pays for itself first only when you start making a significant profit off of it and you’re not throwing it all back into the business can you really start thinking okay maybe

I’ll start i’ll start kind of do diverting away from other things to get to this all right so last bit here then uh that’s i know that’s a downer but that’s it’s a real good disclaimer and i really think it is important when it comes to that

All right last bit here uh so what’s next i got all that stuff i understand i’m doing it for the right for the quote-unquote right reasons there’s no right reason for streaming just be aware of that i get it again if you want to make if you want to

Try to turn this in a career i’m not going to stop you just from my own personal experience and attempting that once or twice in my life it is not worth mental anguish it just isn’t keep it as a fun uh fun lighthearted hobby try to put the time in where you can

And try to build up that stuff where you can eventually get into some good stuff so that to that end once you become an affiliate stream just keep streaming do what you’re streaming before stream some more uh try to try to of course implement the various revenue things that you now have

But keep on streaming this is really truly the start of your journey here on twitch i have fun with it experiment do weird stuff don’t just stick to all the same stuff all the time do something new something different uh what was it my fiance and i just recently did a

Stream where i pretended that i was on an hgtv show uh as we were rolling with um you’re supposed to keep streaming what we were pretending to be we’re on an hgtv show uh where she was like the like the house minder and i was like the client who was like

You know i really want this to be a sky room and people bother you know people ate that up they had a great time with it do things that are different from the norm and you’re gonna have more fun or it falls flat you know not to do it

Again but you don’t know until you try don’t get discouraged if your growth is slow if you’re like you’re in this and for one year and you don’t have more than 10 viewers that’s great if you have 10 viewers if you have 10 average viewers on your channel

You are in the top five percent of streamers period if you get like 40 viewers you are within the top one percent you are the one percent if you have like 25 average viewers on your channel and that is uh that’s something that i think people lose track of especially when

They there are two million other streamers out there but there really are two million other streamers out there and if you’re hitting double digits you’re doing better than a couple hundred thousand of them um but the biggest thing is just focus on your own growth focus on community retention on things like that

Do not try to jump immediately from affiliate to partner it’s not gonna go well you’re not gonna feel good you have to go from three viewers to 75 and even then 75 is actually not enough for partner and again you can watch the partner workshop to figure out how that

Why that what that actually means there focus on you focus on the content focus on what you’re doing and then if that continues to grow then you can start working on the other things after that just make the best channel you can do have or celebrate the things that you

Now have access to in his affiliate but other than that just keep on streaming and keep enjoying yourself on this little platform last chance for questions i’ve gone on for two hours i’m so sorry morag and anybody else who’s here for producing but i figured that was a lot of stuff we

Wanted to cover i wrote all this very recently and uh i wanted to make sure that we with that i was thorough on this because i wasn’t really nitty-gritty with other things and i really wanted to get in the nitty-gritty on this one because i feel

Like there’s just not a lot or not a ton of uh information out there especially on twitch’s own stuff right oh man i missed it i missed it can you store the beginning here we go no but yeah of course you can always watch this vod

Uh over again if you missed a section or if i went through stuff too quick uh be sure to go watch it again right and if you have any questions uh feel free to hit people up on streamer square throughout the throughout the weeks on their various shows

And if you have any questions for me specifically i’m always available on twitter on uh discord things like that you can find me via the name that you see on the screen here um always happy to help with this uh last chance for questions otherwise guys i think we’ll be hitting will be

Hitting the hay hitting the road um we’ll be doing more workshops like this every wednesday we have a new topic um and it’s usually just things that people might not necessarily know about right and i always want to try to help people where we can while i’d be personally

Streaming tonight the answer is no cunning dolphin and that’s another thing if you’re not going to stream and it’s on schedule be sure to let people know so they don’t come up to the stream and show and show up disappointed zeldafan’s still going on coming off and

So i’m going to do that anyway that’ll do it for me guys thank you so much uh next week is another workshop coming up i believe by uh mac and cheese it’s gonna be super great i don’t know what the topic is yet but we’ll have fun with it

Uh enjoy keep learning keep trying keep exploring and have some fun here on twitch all right we’ll see you guys later bye Me