Let me attempt to formulate thoughts about vstream, while it’s morning and nobody is up yet.
Basically VStream is doing what I think the mistep of Mixer did, and other things. To start off VStream put their monetization requirements very high. It got instant backlash, but they gave monetization to a few more dedicated people like me who got in early. They are very closely modeled off of youtube, so they require 500 followers and 1000 watch hours before monetization.
As of the last time I checked the discord, there’s only been ONE streamer who’s at that level, she did an absurd amount of streaming to do that. Which good on her, it’s Hershey, she’s very cool!
But I don’t think they realize WHAT a feat that is. VStream is a TINY platform, and it’s a streaming platform for a niche genre. It’s shown very clearly that less people follow on twitch to get alerts than people subscribe on youtube, because youtube is a multi-faceted platform that has a HUGE amount of people browsing it. I’ve been doing twitch for 11 years and have 488 followers, and I’ve had my youtube kicking around for 3 years, going long stretches of time without uploads and no truely viral hits, and I’m at 725 subscribers. VStream is first and foremost a streaming platform (it’s in it’s name), and streaming platforms, regardless of size, cannot compare to the numbers gained on motherfuckin’ YOUTUBE. So it’s really high.
The reason for this, is that they also offer monetization if you are already a youtube partner, without having to grow your VStream following. They say twitch affiliate is too easy to get so they won’t count it. This is where it becomes clear is that they are expecting their growth to come from larger creators -moving- their audience to VStream. While obviously their idea of larger creators is people as low as 1k subs on youtube, it’s still a similar thought pattern to Mixer, in that you want to -move- people over from a pre-existing fanbase. This is what I feel was the cause of Mixer’s death. The highest amount of (engaged) traffic VStream got was when it first started out. People were streaming on VStream because it was new, and staying because there was a sense of community and a high level of activity in chats, and were doing raids before they were actually a feature. There was a sense of COMMUNITY. There are lots of platoforms or other softwares that exist, who can’t compete with The Big Guys, but still have a healthy and supportive userbase because they focus on growing their community from -those in the community- and do one thing well. Mixer spent a lot of money paying top streamers to move over, instead of making deals for mid-sized streamers with great communities to come and engage with a new platform, and they eventually ran out of runway. They could have contributed to their growing Mixer specific community, instead of holding viewers hostage because their favorite streamer is now only on a platform they didn’t choose. Most top streamers who moved, a large amount of their audience DIDN’T move with them, they just stayed on twitch, because they were not engaged community memebers, they were twitch veiwers. You want people who settle in a home, not passerbys.
This is the problem with trying to cater to top and conversion, instead of growing those who are already there and wanting to engage. VStream just introduced a change in that only streams with a certain amount of views and the largest preferential will be shown on the ‘currently live’ section of the landing page.
“We know we still need to work on discovery in a big way, but we hope this change starts to increase the number of viewers we have on VStream as without that we don’t really have a business :/”
It felt SUPER disheartening when I went live, forgot to get the link to put into the mastodon post, expecting to grab it from the currently live page, and it wasn’t there even though there weren’t even 2 full rows of streamers shown that were live. That looks terrible! It looks like no one is bothering to stream on VStream when they have incomplete rows, and it feels like absolute shit to people who were planning to start streaming on VStream, to know they won’t be discovered or uplifted unless they FORCE their other viewers to get on VStream. If there is no natural VStream community, and only the converted communities of individual streamers, why would they bother to try?
(As of writing this, there are only 6 streamers being shown that are live. There are only 10 actually live, but jesus only showing 6 on a streaming platform is TERRIBLE. Also they say they do this so they want to get to the “for you” faster, which shows videos and vods. There are only 7 reccomendations there, there’s no reason to work on an algorithm when you just don’t even have enough content to fill anything. All of the uploads are under 25 views. People are coming to VStream to watch streams, what a shocker!)
If larger streamers look at VStream, see only a small amount of people on the live page, and don’t see postive experiences when they click on a stream, why would they attempt to convert? Very much so if they don’t allow twitch affiliates monetization, those who would benefit the most from a more fair renvenue split. If VStream is only matching youtube’s partner split, why would they feel the need to branch out from youtube if they are already a partner? VStream is attempting to focus on their feed feature because that’s what make it unique but it’s…not really good? It’s questionable if people even WANT another twitter-lite feed in their lives. While this COULD be a good way to foster community, it’s just put together in a half-hearted way, while there are much larger issues with making streams more engaging first. Paying money for people to develop api supported apps and alerts, community points alternative, bits alternative, ways to play and engage with your chats! Trying to be a Youtube + Twitter competetor that holds itself to the same standards of tech giants is really foolish! Focus on doing one thing well, and stream IS in the title of the site. You need more viewers for your streams to continue running your business, so make the streams better! Engagement is key! Engagement comes from not uniqueness, but postive experiences. The chances for positive experiences multiply if you have people who feel like it’s worthwhile to put effort into streaming on this platform, have tools to help people feel engaged, and have a sense of larger community.
Instead, they’ve been working on parternships with prisim project & v4mirai, in which you watch a restream of an event not streamed there. They upped it with atleast having oshilive stream on Vstream for a concert, but even a corpo couldn’t break 500 followers on VStream, lmao. It has 11k views, which is the equivilent to a single moderatly well performing youtube video. It’s also a concert, which had 0 viewer interaction. Spending money courting bigger events for singular moments of views does not make a community of streamers. Community is where money comes from. Community is why people feel the need to monetarily support things. That’s why Discord is chocking itself full of monetization, because they are hungrily capitalizing on the fact that communities take place and are grown on it’s platform, even before they had a lot of tools to help easily manage it. They rightfully realized that they weren’t just a gamer chat tool, but saw such growth in communities that they focused feature production to suit that. THAT is how Discord grew into the giant it is today. I mean, if you’re only going to let people login with Discord, you might as well see them as an example. (Yes, I am still whining about the fact that you can’t sign up with an email.)
Basically, I’m starting to lose faith in VStream. It seems like it’s just going to be yet another project that runs out of money while trying to put on pants too large for them.
