Here you can find out more about me, Firefly Daisy, and my personal anecdotes and undertakings during The Stream Scheme project. So what is this scheme all about? Well, it all takes place here on Twitch. The project is in fact part of a third year university course that myself and another student are currently taking at the institution of Game Design at Uppsala University. We’ll be collecting data and publish this data as we go along. The idea is that after our project has been completed and the course is done and dusted, we’ll have learned how to market ourselves as well as our product and of course, the importance of finding an audience that is actually into whatever it is we’re developing. Naturally I figured… why not make myself the product that is to be developed? I’ve been thinking about streaming for a long time and the idea of twitch has always intrigued me. There are in fact people, just regular people with no previous experience or specific schooling, that are able to make a living off playing games or drawing! Can you imagine? The same things we do on our spare time, and continue to do for free!
Of course, I don’t expect to make any kinds of money from this, I’m interested in the actual project itself. What would it take to “make it” on Twitch? What is required of me, what do I need to learn and what do I need to do? I’m hoping to get just a small glimpse of what the real Twitch stars lives are like and then… I’ll write about it!
I hereby invite you to follow me on my humble quest to become a real Twitch Streamer!
Quite a lot has happened since my last post, things are progressing quickly! I mean, we’ve actually started streaming(!!). And yes, it was terrifying. But in a good way. I’ll tell you all about it later on. 😉 Moving on. We’re soon in for another meeting with our mentor. He had some important notes for us last time, for exampe our USP (unique selling point), where we want to be and where the people we want to be like are, what do our viewers want and what is our actual brand? What is the Stream Scheme?
We’re hoping to have some more data to present to him this coming week! We’ve been registering data for each other during our streams, such as how many viewers, how long they stayed for and how many others were streaming / watching in the same category we were in. We’ve spoken with quite a few people through Twitch-chats on other streamers’ channels. (It’s a big part of the streamer community apparently). We’ve also been watching a lot of the more popular streamers lately to get a good picture of what’s expected of us. It’s all about personality and being able to entertain and make friends with your viewers. I figured out that our USP is actually us ourselves. There’s nobody really like me, and that’s what I have to push. Be me and hope people like me. This means I have to invite my viewers in to my own personal sphere, let them have a piece of me. I’ve figured I’ll be focusing on streaming games, mainly because that’s when I’ll be able to give the most of myself. It also helps that it’s involving my viewers in an activity that we both enjoy and share, that part really interests me!
It dawned on me the other day during my stream. I figured I’d try to stand out and so I picked a game that I hadn’t seen many people play on Twitch: The Stanley Parable. It was the perfect pick for my first stream, it’s a game that can be completed in a short time, it has multiple endings which gives it good replay value and on top of it all I hadn’t played it before even though it’s always been on my to do list like… forever. Now that we’re on the subject… I only got two to three unique viewers, but they did stick around for nearly the whole stream which makes me feel really honoured quite frankly! The video can now boast with two views in our library. 😉 Sadly, my school laptop was struggling and it was lagging a few times. It’s a bit of a disaster since Twitch viewers value quality very highly, either the sound and video is top notch or they’re not going to stick around to watch your garbage. Hopefully I’ll have it sorted until next time, I’m already looking forward to it!
Other than that, I’m done with most of the artwork that I figured we needed for our page. I feel as if our Facebook page, Twitter Page and Twitch-account are pimped out enough for now. If we manage to get more followers and actually make affiliates, we’ll be spending some more time on more advanced art for sure. 🙂 Go have a look why don’t you?
In the meantime, here’s a little snapshot of me to entertain you until next time.
In preparation for our “launch”, I’ve been burying my face into a few books on business and marketing… (Surprisingly, not quite as boring as it sounds!) I got a lot of good ideas from it, but most important of all, reading them was kind of like getting a good pep-talk, it made me feel more excited and eager about getting started! I quite enjoy reading course literature, mainly because I really like to learn new things but also, reading non-fiction makes you feel like you’re actually getting things done, you’re memorizing, gaining an upper hand, you’re physically studying! However, Rob Walling quickly dragged me back down to earth, with a big, fat slap in the face. I quote from his book Start Small, Stay Small: A developer’s guide to launching a Startup:
“Another common distraction masquerading as productivity is reading business books. It sure seems like Why We Buy6, Made to Stick7 and Outliers8 are going to help you launch a successful product. But reading books gets you no closer to launching than watching Lost.”
Well… that’s a bummer. Still, I figured that after having read the books, I’d feel more prepared and ready for the challenge. At least in theory! Mr Wallings advice was duly noted… as was a lot of other things he wrote. I often take notes when reading my course literature, it’s a good study tip by the way! I started doing it when I had to read three books in two days in order to write an essay that was dangerously close to passing the deadline a couple of years ago… I had to have a few good quotes for the assignment, but I noticed I was also getting a lot more out of the books I read, information that mattered to me and interested me. For the record, one book I’d really recommend is Austin Kleon’s book Show Your Work! It felt particularly inspiring in preparation of our streaming project.
We’ve also had a meeting with our mentor, Adam Mayes. He’s really supportive of our work, it made me feel a little more confident in what we’re doing. We discussed the matter of dealing with online harassment, he had yet another book to recommend us. This one written by Violet Blue, A Smart Girls Guide to Privacy. I guess I’ll add it to the list! I’ve also got to finish reading Lean Startup by Eric Ries (It’s kind of heavy stuff). Other things we discussed was cross pollination, how do we reach out to our audience? We’ll consider starting up Instagram as well, as that seems to be quite a popular platform these days. I was also concerned about showing my face, Adam came up with an interesting idea: how about using a mask? A sort of masquerade mask might work! I’ve actually got one but I’m also a bit worried that I might start reciting “Remember remember the 5th of November…”
You’d be surprised how long it takes to actually start up new accounts on social media! The Stream Scheme now has a Facebook page, a Twitter account, two Twitch accounts (one personal for Firefly Daisy) and one personal blog each. I’m still considering starting up an account in Instagram, as that’s apparently a thing. I suppose an account there would mostly consist of updates as to when we’re streaming with snapshots of what we’re actually streaming. Another, perhaps later project, would be to create a Discord channel. According to our research, a lot of the more popular streamers offer their VIP audience a place in their Discord channel to actually be able to speak with the streamers during their live stream. It is a bit of a pain to keep several accounts updated with basically the same content. Although once all of the accounts have been started, filled in with initial information about us and the project and finally made to look pretty, it should become a lot easier and less time consuming to manage them.
The current stage of the project still revolves around data collection and research. I created a survey using the Google Forms tool (really quite handy, though it may be perceived as the most proffessional of surveys). The goal of said survey was to find out about peoples habits when it comes to watching streams; Do they use YouTube or Twitch? What time of day do they watch? What do they do for a living? How old are they? etc. The survey was directed at our specific target audience, streamers and those who already are regular viewers. Meaning in a sense, the Stream Scheme will be relying on “stolen” viewers from other channels… Hopefully there’s time enough for all of us to go around! It was difficult to actually reach out to this specific audience with the survey, Twitch and YouTube isn’t some forum or social network like Facebook, there was nowhere to simply post a request for people to fill it in. So where to find the audience in order to ask them? I looked around on Facebook and found a few groups there for streamers, I was able to join them and could send my survey their way. I also have the luxury of knowing a high school teacher, she offered to ask a whole class of students to fill it in as well! I only managed to gather around 50 replies, but it was enough to give us an idea of what we need to do and who we need to become for our viewers.
We found through the survey that the most important thing is the streamer. It is about charisma and personality, they watch for the person not for the content. This puts some extra pressure on us for sure… Most people watch streams where the streamers play games, this made me more convinced of baking in more game-time into my streams. There are definitely more people watching Twitch over YouTube, although I did intentionally focus my survey on Twitch-users. The age group varies, most people are young however and they are mainly students. It would seem the next generation of young people prefer watching streamers rather than watching TV. On the Facebook group for twitch-streamers I saw posts along the lines of “Hey guys, can you recommend me to a new Streamer I haven’t seen yet?”. I find it fascinating! I think I’d still prefer finish watching The Defenders on Netflix… Yes, I’m a little late to the party… Perhaps I will think differently in a couple of months myself. Until next time. 🙂
Oh, and in case you’d like to fill in the survey yourself, here’s a link!
After a quick google search for “top female streamers” the second result is “The Hottest Female Streamers on Twitch“. It is closely followed up by “10 hottest female streamers who got famous playing video games” and “Top 10 beautiful female streamers from Twitch”. I did the same search but switched female to male and oddly enough, I got results that were more generally aimed towards twitch streamers, as in non gendered. “Top 100 streamers on Twitch”. Fair enough however, I did get a couple of results from reddit where they compare cute male streamers and another for good looking male streamers. It is a fact that female streamers on Twitch aren’t too common, and it seems to me that out of the most popular female streamers, good looks is a beneficial factor to their success. (Doesn’t bode well for me guys!)
The main reason for checking these top streamers out was to get an idea of how to find a name for myself. Female popular names tend to be something along the lines of Vixen, Miss/Mrs/Ms, Fruit, Kitten, Sparkle, Pink, Girl etc… In other words, something that makes you think of rainbows, unicorns and temptresses. Male names were harder to categorize, however they were often not linked to their gender. My own personal theory on that matter is that women attempt to use their female sounding names to their advantage, as a way to break away from the male norm. It is obviously easier to market oneself when one is a little different from the rest. One may also suggest that it is a means of self expression where it would seem the main focus on identifying oneself lies within ones own gender and the gender norm that comes with it rather than other other personal qualities.
When it came to picking an alter ego for myself, I wanted it to describe me for what I am so I thought of several words. It was also important to me to not pick a name that could be making myself an easy target of sexual harassment. (For example a name like PowerPuss, yeah it did actually cross my mind…) I tried looking at words that I associated with, such as procrastination, dragons, cats and being late. I then looked at synonyms for these words: Dawdle, Overdue, EleventhHours, Belated… Perhaps combine them in some way? What about a play on words, something that’s catchy and has double meaning? I love words with double meaning…
Finally I got a hold of myself, perhaps I had been a little pretentious. I figured be a little more careless and casually laid back with my name. You know, in a cool “I don’t give a shit” way. In spite of the fact that throughout my so far three decades long existence, cool has been in the bottom of a long list of words that came to anyones mind as they have thought of me… (One day I will have my redemption!) Unicorns and rainbows? Sure I can do that. I continued my google adventure and searched for “My Little Pony Name Generator” and I found this masterpiece of a website! Obviously, my main inspiration for this choice comes from Friendship is Magic. 😉
Behold my new second self: Firefly Daisy. Below follows a description, the kangaroo sidekick is a little interesting…
Find your own name here: http://pony.namegeneratorfun.com
Firefly Daisy 