Twitch vs Steem

in steem •  6 years ago  (edited)

This is a post I've been wanting to address for quite some time. I realize that many of the active users on Steem may not be into streaming or watching streamers at all and it might be a new thing for them. It is a fact that it is a rising market though and Twitch has been the leading platform ever since the early beginnings of this activity. Even though many here may not agree nor do they see the importance of users being able to stream through Steem on platforms such as Vimm.tv much of the younger viewers do understand it.

Vimm.tv is fairly new and in alpha, it relies on a 12% beneficiary reward as of now so that's the number I will go with when comparing it to Twitch. This post is to make it a bit more clear of how different it is for a streaming platform to exist on a centralized platform such as Twitch or a platform built on a decentralized network such as Steem.

There are four major ways for streamers to earn on Twitch, the first one is:

Donations

On Twitch viewers can directly donate money to streamers with a credit card or Paypal. Twitch used to some times take 1% off of that but it wasn't always the case, even so Paypal has it's own fees which usually are 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. Imagine that if you want to donate $1 to your favorite streamer he would only receive around $0.66 effectively losing 33% of its value. After much complaints from streamers Twitch decided to eliminate the middlemen and create their own currency to handle donations. Oh wow! Twitch is so awesome! Wait, instead of the streamer having to lose a big cut of the donation, people who now wanted to buy their ironically named centralized currency "bits" have to pay 40% more for the value these bits hold. If you want to donate $10 to your favorite streamer you'd have to spend $14. Fun, right? Not only are there a ton of rules involved with what you can do with your bits and how you can ask for them but Twitch is taking a 40% cut all the way through from people wanting to donate making it more acceptable to go back to Paypal.

How does that work on Steem? Oh right, zero fees for transactions. If you want to send someone $1 in SBD, he will receive exactly $1 in SBD, end of discussion.

Ads

Every time someone (without adblock) opens up your stream for the first time they get an ad they gotta watch through, the streamer makes a tiny percentage of this adrevenue. As a partner with Twitch they also get a so called "ad button", they can press this button to show an ad to all of their current viewers by the click of a button. You're going for a quick bio break? Ad! Gonna go have a quick cigarette? Ad! Long loading screen coming up in the game you're playing? AD AD AD! With this Ad button they generate a lot more revenue.

As of right now there are no advertisements on Vimm.tv and neither on Steem the same way*.

I say the same way because people can advertise things through posts on Steem or buy buying votes or using the "promotions" tab where they pay SBD to be listed there which gets burned in the @null account effectively making Steem/SBD more scarce and indirectly raising the value of all investors holding Steem Power. Not going to get into this part too much cause I both lack the exact knowledge of the technicalities behind it and I think it would require a whole post of its own. Let's just say we have no ads similar to Twitch and other platforms.

Subscriptions

On Twitch people can buy a subscription which gives them certain badges that show up behind their username in chat and allows them the use of certain emojis and custom emojiss of the streamer they are subscribed to. The subscriptions cost $5 but have two other higher tiers which at this point in time pretty much only give you access to more emojis (I know it's pretty dumb). But hey, you'll also get a notification to your email when your streamer comes online! Guess how much Twitch takes from the $5 subscription cost? FIFTY FUCKING PERCENT.

On Steem we basically have Gina bot that's been free to use in forever and gives you a lot of notifications which you can adjust in many ways and we will hopefully get "yotifications" on Steemit.com :soon:.
On Vimm.tv I am sure there is a notification alert, what their plans are with emojis and if that will ever cost is yet unknown but I doubt they will start taking 50% for themselves.

Sponsorships

Last but not least, sponsorships. This is something that might occur on Steem a lot more than the rest of the methods listed above. On Twitch streamers occasionally get sponsored by companies to stream for a game they want to advertise. For instance if you happen to see a few big time streamers play the same game on Twitch one day it might be that they've received a sponsorship to do so. They are legally required to make it clear that they are getting paid for playing that game by the Federal Trade Commission. This is were the big money comes in and it usually goes to the streamers with the most viewers since they have most of the visibility.

The reason I said that these activities can happen a lot more on Steem is because it is quite easy in this day and age, even to avoid the FTC's laws. Someone can for instance contact you telling you that you'll get $1k for writing a positive post for an ICO or product on your Steem blog. Even though most authors have the decency to make it clear that the post in question is paid promotion, some do not. The reason I said it's easy in this day and age to not make it public that someone has paid you to advertise their product is because crypto is making things a lot more hard to track. Currencies such as Monero and other privacy focused ones are a general go to when handling such activities, of course just sending someone coins to their exchange directly is also more than enough to not risk someone finding out about it.

On Steem these sponsorships can happen in many ways, people can write something positive about you in hopes of getting paid by you through an upvote. People can make deals with you that if you give them part of your post rewards they will vote on your post instead of vote-trading with someone else. That is if they don't already have most of their voting power delegated to a bid bot. All of these occur mostly due to post rewards being 75% and curators being a smaller and smaller part of the platform due to the incentive for a higher ROI being so much lower. Oh well, we can only improve from here on out, I hope.

Anyway, in my opinion it is not going to take a lot for a decent competitor to show up and out compete Twitch and their centralized monopoly of streamers and viewers. It would be really awesome if that happened on Steem and I am looking forward to see how Vimm.tv develops to take that role. I am okay with their beneficiaries and so should you be, if something looks too good to be true it might prove itself to not be (cough, dlive, cough). If anything it showed that all the rewards the streamers earned during its time were still theirs because Steem is decentralized and no one can take your rewards away from you. I am hoping to see some healthy competitions in many of the existing dapps on Steem and most importantly for them to take down the current centralized and greedy giants taking full advantage of their positions.


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There are some things still missing from this post such as curation and being rewarded for rewarding your favorite streamers through votes which I will go through in another post, this was mainly for direct donations and how streamers can earn through ad revenue.

This is the second post I've seen from reputable Steemians about Vimm.tv so it's time I look in to setting up an account. I've become extremely centralized resistant since discovering Steemit. Naturally, I won't be using DLive any more, so Vimm.tv may be the best current alternative to the 100 hours of God of War IV I still need to get through. Those Twitch rates are appalling.

If your pc allows you to record your streams while streaming then you probably should as vimm.tv doesn't save streams as of now. I'm sure they could use some more funding especially through streamers giving them beneficiaries to further develop, though.

The only reason I haven't been streaming lately is due to my relocation and my pc not having arrived yet.

Lol saw what you did here

if something looks too good to be true it might prove itself to not be (cough, dlive, cough).😉

Am not much of a twitch fan but I do watch donations videos made on twitch and then uploaded on youtube, have seen viewers donate thousands of dollars to streamers, if only they knew a platform existed were they could support their fav streamer regularly while retaining their investment and also earning alongside via curation reward.

I bet they would start rushing to steem.

We still need more publicity and hope the about to end netcoin contest do that for us, even if its a small percentage.

Whew, I didn't know Twitch took that much out of the money that went into the Streamer's pocket... But hey, it contrasts a lot with Steem's form of payments and policies overall. Over here there are literally no fees if you want to donate X amount to someone and that's one of the reasons of why I believe in Steemit as a whole.

I personally can't stream because my internet connection is absolutely trash, but I have looked into uploading stuff to Dtube because I thoroughly believe I could get as much income out of Steemit as I would in Youtube or other sites like that.

Hooray for uploading original content to Steemit!

Good comparison. You explained your points clearly.
I'm very curious what would happen if more people knew and use cryptos such as (especially) Steem.
I think the biggest problem at the moment is mass adoption..
Firstly you have to teach the mass why to use crypto and which advantages may result..

Very nice comparison, but Twitch is too durable to rival with him.

In my opinion, money is a secondary matter, the ranges are important, the number of viewers (which translates into earnings), but this gives the "TOP 1" in terms of streaming platforms.Vimm just take some more attention from steemit users. We can hope that Vimm will grow to this level, to compete with this thieving platform. It's time to close the monopoly!

Obviously Steem is better for streamers...but they need to add a way to directly buy Steem with fiat in the interface so any idiot can do it.

They should also probably should make it so not as many idiots just lose their accounts because they don't know how the passwords and everything works. Wouldn't look so good if we end up with tons of reviews about how people lost thousands of dollars and there's no password recovery. It might not be as secure, but we need password management services for idiots.

#sorrynotsorry

I think that something like Vimm could do that for their platform. I don’t think that would be good for Steemit overall, it decreases the goal of decentralization to have a database of passwords one can change. I could be totally wrong but that’s how I see it in my head.

No, it's totally against everything crypto...but just hang out in steem.chat for a week. Look at the number of idiots that lose their passwords. Then realize that the majority don't come in there, and of the ones that do, most know there's no help for them.

Real people lose passwords. We need some site that will remember them for them, and possibly interface with the other Steem sites.

We need that ease of use.

I can add from myself that steem is more fair to the streamers. I mean vimm is still alpha and there is many things to improve, but the benetifs got reduced by 6% in short time, that is amazing! Anyway i think day by day should be better after changing script with leaderboard points and bigger upvotes from the vimm and other big gaming communites like a steemgc. i see many involved people who want boost vimm to next level. i am glad that i am early member of that rising part of community. We don't have view bots, which can boost number of viewers and the score on the leaderbord is proportional to the effort of each streamer who try climbing higher. Every month leaderboard get reset and all can try climb to the top. Everyone like competition and chasing the best, so that is the another reason to start stream.

Steemmonters+twitch=BOOM!

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Yes I guess it is something new for users and some of them might not have the time or the interest, but that the future . It will happen to Steemit as well, but it is a matter of time. Many things we couldnt even imagine already happened so why not this!

Great post bro, just what I needed to share on other social networks.

STEEM is so easier to use and better than to streem on twitch... I can't imagine being on twitch and having curation show or getting rewards like here. I know I wouldn't be able to help the community as much as I can here so being there seems like a waste of time...

The gaming community is big and it can make STEEM bigger and that is the topic we need to take care of. I believe @ned will help @vimm at least a bit at the beginning, later he can delegate more when he see how big we are...

Time will tell but I don't worry because some things are simply better than others and it's just a matter of time when they will be banned from there or they will not be satisified there...

#steemyo

Yes you are right twitch takes 2.50 dollar from subscriptions quite bad worst than paypal !

Twitch is going down, facebook is pushing hard, but i think steemit would be a better option...

I upvoted your post.

Keep steeming for a better tomorrow.
@Acknowledgement - God Bless

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Is it too much to ask for a decent mobile streeming app or platform. I think even twitch is lacking in this area. If a steem dapp were to make a decent one they could not only gain steem users, but also of those looking to stream casually.

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This is a great info for me... I'm a newbie here and with this info I can be guided to what to do... Thank you

I wonder if vimm.tv would have the streamer AD button in the future.

and I wonder if people would just put bot accounts to watch, and then spam the AD button.

Vimm.tv just needs exposure like twitch to grow, because it's fucking crazy how much Twitch is ripping off it's users. I mean as these platforms grow in popularity so does their ego thinking they can now profit more of their users.

I am not a streamer but i do like playing a lot of video games such as the Witcher 3 or assassins creed. If only the Vimm.TV was on PS4 i'd be able to record it and just post, in a simplified process.

The problem with donating steem or SBD ( for now ) is the lack of easy access to fiat/steem exchanges. For a person that doesn't have much steem and wants to buy some in order to make a larger donation, he is going to lose a considerable amount of money on buying bitcoin and deposit and withdrawal fees. The idea for steem is awesome but we are some way away from getting steem to act as currency.

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This is a booming market and I am happy somebody developed an application to address it.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts @acidyo

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The fees on Twitch are crazy. When I get donations or bits I am happy but at the same time I feel bad that the viewers ending up losing a 30-50% of his/her money just to send it my way. I think that the low fees of Steemit could attract viewers when the site becomes more user friendly and vimm develops the platform a bit more. A problem I noticed with DLive was that there were people streaming, but there really wasn't a viewer base. The incentive for people to come over is a lot times they can make some money on Steemit from streaming, and that of course attracts more streamers than viewers. I'm not sure what it would take to get vimm big. Maybe a large advertisement campaign outside the platform.

You got a 14.97% upvote from @ocdb courtesy of @acidyo!

Does Vimm.tv have a Steemit account or person we could follow and give likes and exposure to? That would be a good way to get them to more users here.

I don’t really use twitch much, one of the YouTube’rs I watch a lot moved over to twitch due to the censorship on YouTube but my work WiFi blocks it so I’ve used it once at home. I think there is lots of room for our platform to grow but I just hope the same debacle that happened with DLive doesn’t happen with Vimm. I don’t know enough about them though to pass judgment.

Thanks for the post though, I think it would be great if we could get more people onto the projects built off our platform, we certainly have the potential.

Good One!! Been looking for a new place to stream after the dLive incident HappyStream SteemianGamers..

I am all in for the best distribution of rewards.

I would love to stream my Fortnite Gameplays but sadly I don't have a nice Internet connection. I already play at around 200 Ms Ping do if I try to stream my gameplay my ping gets over 800 Ms which makes my game extremely laggy.

I am really waiting for some nice Internet service to reach where I am staying.