Pro Tip: Twitch is Greater Than Instagram Live

I’m not sold on Instagram’s live video feature. A lot of people use it, because it’s easy and they let you share the stream to messenger. It’s a point and click experience.

So is Twitch, granted there is a bit more effort involved in advertising your stream. I believe in Twitch so much, wrote a little something to help people get started on Twitch. There are several big differences between Twitch and Instagram that make it a better platform. On that note, Facebook Live is trash too.

YouTube Live is good but comes with limitations. Oh Holden, why should we listen to you on any of this. I made 197.49$ on Twitch and 233.38$ on YouTube last year. I don’t know how much Instagram paid you, but I’m trying to get me the bag with this content life.

I’m aware my numbers aren’t amazing, but I also didn’t push my content last year. That’s the not trying version. I don’t know if this counts as a How-To but think of it as how to think about the bigger picture with regards to Twitch being better than Instagram.

Instagram feels like a one-way call

Instagram’s growth and payout model relies heavily on selling products/services directly and advertising other people’s product/services. When you get traffic on Instagram, the value proposition is enough people will see this “ad” of sorts, and then buy the product/service. This is why they don’t care as much about paying you, you’re supposed to have a funnel.

Yes, you can leave comments on an Instagram live. Being the person streaming a live video, Instagram provides garbage tools to manage your audience. It’s hard to follow the chat and everything is so basic.

Full disclosure I am a geek about this. I don’t mind going through obstacles to get cool stuff. I do admit that using filters when live is fun. However, when I go on Instagram Lives, all I think is, this person could have made more money on YouTube or Twitch.

Maybe in the United States there are good live payment tools for live streams, but I don’t think they exist in Canada yet. Okay, money isn’t really the main reason I don’t like Instagram for this purpose.

Instagram takes your phone away. You can no longer do anything else on your phone when watching a live. Then it announces you every time you come back on the live. It snitches on out that you left the live in the first place.

It almost feels like no one cares how long you stick around on Insta. There’s a big ADHD feel to how it all plays out.

Twitch understands the mobile user

Twitch needed to differentiate from YouTube. Real talk, there is a good business case to go to YouTube to focus your lives. The biggest buzzkill is that as a user, you need to pay for what I consider to be the ultimate video feature on a phone. The ability to have the video open as a smaller window, while you answer messages.

You can watch a live stream and respond to a text. You can play a mobile game and watch me Bridge the Gap with people. It’s easy to click back into the stream when you want to chat and it’s the only app that gives you this feature, for free.

When you are streaming on a computer there is a mobile command center for your stream you can use on your phone. When you do stream on your phone you can easily see the chat and manage your stream.

When I say easily, there isn’t a notification for everyone joining the live making the chat impossible to read. Maybe this is a me thing, but I watch people struggle to deal with their IG chats, on lives, all the time.

Somehow the Twitch crowd and YouTube crowds handle this better.

Maybe the chat argument is less good. Twitch however is designed with an audience who is used to long streams. Add in the ability to multi-task on your phone and it’s a big win.

You will get monetized on Twitch, fast

For real, it’s easy to become an Affiliate on Twitch. You need to stream for 8.3 Hours over a month. You need to also stream 7 different times at least. You then need to get 4-5 homies to sit on your stream.

After 28 days, once you hit the average of 3 viewers you have one more obstacle. You also need 50 followers. I promise if no one else can, I can help you get those 50 followers. Just telling my audience and my socials to show some love.

The second we start talking that trying to get monetized talk, people support. Twitch is like that.

Once you are monetized the fun begins. Anyone with an Amazon Prime account can basically give you 2.50 USD a month for free. Each Twitch account, with Prime attached, gets to gift out a free sub a month.

People can also just pay to subscribe. I have paid Le Mef every month for over 2 years at this point. He barely even streams these days; I’ve made the joke I’m helping pay for his university like he’s a stripper.

There is also a system called bits, which is like throwing pennies (literally) at the strip club. One time I made 60$ on a stream where I recorded music. Yes, I made actual money recording one time.

The YouTube copywrite conundrum

I’ll be completely honest, if you are able to livestream without any copywrite infringement, YouTube Live may be the platform for you. Be cognizant of their advertiser rules. You can’t necessarily swear as much or smoke a copious amount of herbals.

I once got a copywrite strike on YouTube for streaming a URL battle. They shut my livestream down and said no no no. This isn’t a claim, this is the scary we will end your channel strike.

In theory the interviews I do can go on YouTube now that I don’t play any music beforehand. However, I like having the option of stopping the interview to play relevant videos.

What we do for the reviews is stream the content to Twitch and Facebook. Twitch lets you play whatever you want (within reason, Hollywood flicks may get you in trouble). When Facebook gets mad it clips the livestream and then they sometimes take the video down, but no real consequence other than it’s annoying.

Twitch just lets you stream. The video after may get muted but we play all kinds of YouTube content on our streams with no cproblems. Since Facebook will clip your stream before you are done, it’s a really bad home for anything that may have copywritten material in it.

Streaming tends to be loosey goosey

The biggest violation for copywrite you will encounter will be playing music. Once yours and my peers put our music through a Distrokid type system, we stamped our music. There is literally a check box we press to get YouTube to flag stuff, this is and opt-in thing on Distrokid.

My point is these copywrite systems are doing their job to protect the music of the artists who use their service. This means your homie can’t just give you permission in a DM.

It also means we deal with things like Facebook clipping streams where we play our own music. Currently Instagram is fighting with me as I try and explain I’m the person who made the song they claim I violated copywrite with.

In the current landscape, Twitch and TikTok Live seem to be the safest places to go play music. Twitch is cool because you can also play YouTube videos, video games and whatever else you can think of.

I recommend Googling which companies care if you play their content. Some do, like Disney. Others don’t like Empire.

Once our review stream is done, yes, I know a little late, we edit out the copywritten material and post to YouTube after. We have fun on the stream and clean it up for the other platforms.

Twitch has custom emojis

This part is freaking dope. There are customizable emojis you can upload knows as emotes. They tend to become part of your channel’s lore and are used by your audience to communicate things.

One of the Behind That Suit ones is a “knowledge nugget”. When you learn something knew, drop that knowledge nugget and let the people know.

Since emojis are the Orwellian short speak of 1984, we may as well ride the wave. No other platform is so easily giving you visual communication options that are so easily spread. People can take your emotes and use them in other chats, effectively being stickers they slap on other streams.

There is a free tier of emotes that people can unlock by following your channel. Then there are special ones that are gated behind subscription tiers. Bonnie literally pays 13$ a month to use her face on other people’s streams.

These things also show up on the video. There is a tool called an Emote Wall that will flash the emotes used in a chat on a stream. This lets your emotes bridge the gap to other social media platforms while instantly showcasing a stream is lit.

Channel points and reward systems

Twitch, owned by Amazon, understands how addicted we are to point collection. As people stay on your stream, they earn channel points. You can name them what you want, on Behind That Suit they are Knowledge Nuggets.

Your viewers can then spend those points on custom rewards. There are plugins you can get that let your audience gamble in the chat. There are leaderboards so that the people can flex how loyal they are to you.

Twitch set it up that your day ones can prove they are day ones. There is no question about it, Stream Elements has a little command that lets anyone check how long anyone has been a part of the following. It can tell you the exact amount of time a person has watched my content live.

Used correctly by a creator this unlocks a lot of ways to keep your audience on your stream. There are even ways to reward users with a VIP badge, which unlocks some special privileges. Everything about Twitch’s ecosystem is based on making your audience want to come back.

Plus, the raid tool lets you bring an audience to another stream when you are done. What does someone on Instagram do? Nothing, they dead the stream and the audience moves on.

Seeing streams that should be on Twitch

I wrote this because I was sent a stream I felt should be on Twitch. Unfortunately, finding the time to meet up and go over all of this gets harder to do with people as we get busier. This way I can share what I’ve learned, make my case and hope people pick it up.

The quick TL:DR version is this:

• Twitch gets you paid

• Twitch lets mobile users multitask

• Instagram does not have custom emotes

End of the day I want to see us all win. Twitch is a highly collaborative platform. All love to the DJs but I’d rather be raiding podcasts and rappers.

Hope to see you in a Discord soon. Wait … what? I know, we’ll talk on Discord soon.

Live Long and Prosper Everyone