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Waterluviantoday at 6:13 PM2 repliesview on HN

Something I've noticed a lot with Twitch streamers and YouTubers is that many of them want the outcome and are prepared to do the work, but want some sort of guarantee of success. It's very difficult to really sell to people that you will work very hard for a while and there's absolutely no promise that you'll ever have more than 14 subscribers. That's simply the core risk of entrepreneurship.


Replies

djarotoday at 6:45 PM

Also, as someone who's main source of income is a YouTube channel: there is a type of threshold effect, where your videos are not good enough to watch until one day they suddenly are.

This means that until you reach that threshold, it feels like you're not making progress, cause every video just gets the same result (no views). Even if below the surface, you're slowly inching closer to that moment where your videos will actually be watched.

AlienRobottoday at 9:15 PM

I have the impression it's more of a "bait and switch" thing. People get into streaming thinking they can just play games and make money, but then they realize nobody is going to watch someone play game X, they all want to watch game Y, because game Y is popular right now among the people who have the most time to play games and watch streams (kids). So they enter the industry thinking they can just do whatever they want, and quickly realize they have to do infinite things they don't want to actually reach the level of popularity they need.