Meet the people making a living live-streaming their niche hobbies, travel adventures, and everyday lives on Twitch (AMZN, GOOG, GOOGL)
Screenshot / Business Insider
Twitch — a subsidiary of Amazon — has become synonymous with the boom in video game livestreaming. Tyler "Ninja" Blevins, the most popular "Fortnite" player in the world makes Twitch his virtual home, as do eSports heavyweights like the Overwatch League and Tencent.
However, there's a growing community of streamers on Twitch who don't post gaming content at all: They broadcast their real lives, including their weekends spent painting landscapes, their amateur comedy, and their budding skills as musicians.
Twitch has been making moves to embrace this kind of content, dubbed IRL streaming (internet slang for "in real life).
IRL has become a catch-all term for any kind of streaming that isn't gaming. But it's led the site to become home to an expanding population of artists, comedians, podcasters, musicians, athletes, cooks and social media influencers, all looking to make a living through live-streaming — right alongside Twitch's usual blend of "Fortnite" and other games.
Here's what it's like to live-stream professionally:
Today, Twitch has roughly 2.2 million unique monthly broadcasters competing for the attention of the site's 15 million daily users.
twitch.tv/thabuttress"People go to Twitch to be anyone they want to be, to go wherever they want to go," said Twitch streamer thaButtress, who asked not to be identified by her real name in order to protect her privacy.
She makes her living by building scale models of the giant robots from the "Gundam" anime franchise, broadcasting the process to her audience of about 19,000 followers.
"My coworkers were watching Twitch all the time, and saying I should try it out, but they were watching big-time gamers," she says. "I liked gaming, but I was never going to be like that. When Twitch started opening it up to creatives, I really found my niche and my community."
She says that as IRL streaming has expanded on Twitch, she and other streamers have really found their audience — even for relatively niche hobbies like model building.
"The stream teaches me so much about the hobby that I love, and I teach them, too. It’s this great little community of builders that support each other and take care of each other. That's definitely the best part: The community," she said in an interview with Business Insider.
Because Twitch was created with gamers in mind, it can be difficult for creatives like thaButtress to stand out against the many hundreds or thousands of video game streams going on at any given moment.
Screenshot / Business InsiderGenerally, Twitch is organized around the game that's being played: When you first visit the site, you might click on "Fortnite" or "League of Legends," and find a stream to watch from there.
Those who aren't playing a game, though, tend to be grouped into categories like "IRL" and "Creative" — categories that have been criticized as being too broad.
For thaButtress, this means her stream is often found next to those of painters, musicians, and makeup gurus. In other words, you have to navigate around a lot of streams that have little to do with hers in order to find her model-building channel.
Plus, non-gaming streamers sometimes get a bad rap among the Twitch community, says so-called "Twitchhiker" Trevor Daneliuk.
Trevor Daneliuk / @hitch_liveWithout a video game to serve as the figurative center of the stream, IRL streamers will often search for content in the real world.
For many, this means going to interesting places, talking to people, and bringing hundreds of viewers along for the ride. The problem is that a lot of the earliest IRL streamers found themselves mired in controversy, as their antics got them attention for all the wrong reasons.
For instance, Paul "Ice Poseidon" Denino, an early livestreaming superstar on Twitch, was once suspended from the platform for revealing a woman's phone number on his stream, which led to his followers calling her en masse. Denino was later banned from Twitch after one of his viewers called in a bomb threat to an Arizona airport, right as he was boarding a plane.
"IRL streamers have a bad reputation for the way that they get content," said Trevor Daneliuk, a professional live-streaming hitchhiker (or "Twitchhiker") who records his rides (with permission, he's careful to note) as he travels the country.
"People think it's a toxic community, and that people walk around seeking content in irresponsible ways, at other people's expense," says Daneliuk.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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