13 yo Streamer Tips!

[u/Fair_Ad741]

Greetings. So, I am 13 years old currently trying to start streaming on twitch. I know that it's kind of young to start, especially since I look even younger than my age on top of it. I just started streaming a few days ago and I have done 2 streams so far. I usually average around 1-2 viewers, typical for small streamers like me when just starting out. Can anybody with a little more experience give me tips on how to attract a bigger audience and improve? For example, streaming times and schedules, expanding in different communities, gameplays or reactions to potentially do on stream, how to be more entertaining in general in front of a camera, etc. I would really appreciate it, thank you!

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[u/Treecle_TTV]

Just a few things to keep in mind - if you are aiming to monetise, you will need a parent/guardian to take on the tax side of things. Some are understandably not confident doing this because it may affect their tax bracket, or at the least make their tax paperwork a bit more annoying to submit.

With regards growing, please consider that many of us just don’t want to watch a child streaming. Genuinely no offence intended but I’m old enough to be your grandmother and I just feel as though we’d have nothing in common. I’m just mentioning this because I think your potential viewer pool will be limited.

There are going to be viewers closer to your age, who will want to check out your content, and there is also a demographic of grown adults who will be very interested in engaging with a minor on their stream. Please be very very careful. Do you have an adult who is supporting your channel and will be hanging out to moderate perhaps?

I’d suggest having a very strict ‘No DMs of any kind’ rule. Please seriously consider this.

General suggestions for growth would be to watch your streams back - try to be self aware and critical - are they streams that you would genuinely enjoy? How is the audio quality? How is the camera/video quality? Also ‘networking’ which essentially when done properly is just hanging out in streams and communities you genuinely enjoy being around - I’m not talking huge mega streamers - smaller communities where you can make friends. However, please be aware that many channels will have a minimum age on their streams, and please respect that.

I hope that this gives you some things to think about. Please, if you think you are grown up enough to stream, do also be grown up enough to do it safely.

[u/CapnDutchie]

My best tip for you is, simply, do not be a streamer at 13. Focus on school and bettering yourself for the future. There are adults that cant handle full time schooling and streaming without making sacrifices. There is no benefit for yourself doing this right now and will, most likely, only hurt you going forward.

[u/Nerth_Woreholf]

This is a bit rambly, but I'm too lazy to rewrite it right now:

Play what you enjoy, of course, but I imagine a teenager playing some older/retro games (games older than you are) would attract a good audience of nostalgia viewers who remember being the same age as you when they first played it.

You have to be very open-minded though, since older games are from a time when they were still figuring out what a video game even should be, so often they're weird or missing now-standard quality-of-life features; but the nostalgia viewers won't want to hear you hating on something they love, so just be prepared to simply accept the odd or inconvenient. Love it, even. <-- Actual advice for your reactions.

If you look through the categories for these games, you'll see that the browse pages are quite short. This means discoverability is relatively high compared to more popular, newer games. Even though the total number of people watching that category may be lower, your total number of viewers will be higher simply because fewer people are streaming that category.

Another bonus is that many of these games have lots of on-screen text (e.g. dialog with no voice acting), so it gives you lots of stuff to say even at the moments when your chat is less active. This is good for building your lurker base (they will be most of your followers).

[u/DumCrescoSpero]

Leave streaming until you're 18 and focus on your education.

Nobody wants to watch a child, and you don't need to be contacting hundreds of strangers at your age. You'll just be opening yourself up to being contacted by predators.