Twitch, the largest live-streaming platform.

Who knew talking to your computer screen or playing video games could earn you more than $500,000 a month and connections with renowned musicians Travis Scott and Drake? Well, in this day and age, there’s someone doing exactly just that. Tyler “Ninja” Blevins is a live-streamer that has surpassed the expectations of your typical gamer. How does he do it? Well, it’s quite simple; he chose to become a live-streamer.

Anyone who has been on the internet in the past decade has been exposed to the form of entertainment known as live-streaming. It was only recently that the live-streaming industry hit the world by storm, becoming an industry worth well over thirty billion dollars in 2016 according to Amazon; however, how did this industry proliferate in popularity? And what exactly is this industry? Well, live-streaming is the act of entertaining an audience through content that is produced live. Despite there being a variety of content, the type of content that is currently considered popular is gaming. While gaming doesn’t sound like the most entertaining thing to watch, inside gaming streams lie a multitude of hilarious personalities and extremely high skilled players.

The largest streaming platform, Twitch, is owned by Amazon, where there is a reported login of over five million users that tune into their favourite streams for an average of 106 minutes a day. The main question is: what appeal do people find from watching these streams? Well, inside every stream lies a chat feature, allowing the viewer to interact with their favourite streamer. You can learn from these highly skilled players by asking for tips, while simultaneously enjoying the streamer’s entertaining personality. Users, additionally, can choose to subscribe to support their favourite streamers by paying five dollars a month, which gives them additional benefits while watching them. Some of these benefits include access to their favourite streamer’s exclusive emojis, a special chat color that allows the streamer to prioritize responding to their chat messages, and access to rewards the streamer chooses to provide for the viewers. Similarly, users are also given the ability to donate an uncapped amount of money to show appreciation to their favourite streamers. According to Forbes, the largest recorded donation to this date is $74,000, which shows the level of appreciation these viewers have for their favorite streamers.

“Our top streamers are humble, friendly, highly interactive and treat the people in their chat as if they are the stars of the show,” said Twitch’s director of public relations, Chase.

Ninja amidst his stream, Image courtesy of CNN

The most popular streamer, Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, is a young individual who embodies many entertaining qualities. He’s not only extremely outgoing, friendly, and hilarious when he interacts with his viewers, but he’s also extremely skilled at every game. His streams e follow a consistent schedule, so akin to Television Broadcasts, his audience knows what time of the day to turn on his stream. Ninja has become the face of Twitch and all live-streamers in general. According to Business Insider, Ninja currently has 10 million followers on Twitch, 20 million subscribers on YouTube (where he uploads his live-stream highlights), and gains an average of 12,457 followers a day. He makes more than $500,000 a month and is ranked third in most social interactions on Twitter amongst all athletes, trailing only big names such as Ronaldo and Lebron. Even celebrities, such as renowned rappers Drake and Travis Scott request to play games with Ninja. His stream alone with Drake had 628,000 concurrent viewers, meaning that 628,000 people decided to tune into his live-stream all at the same time. Just a year ago, just like you, Ninja was an average person, but now he’s a streamer celebrity. And just like Ninja, you too have access to becoming a Twitch streaming celebrity for free.

With the rapid growth in popularity with live-streaming, many social media companies have begun investing in the industry. Social media giants such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and more are beginning to create their own forms of live-streaming. For Facebook users, live-streaming will appeal to you because of Facebook’s push toward Facebook Live, a form of live-streaming that is currently used in Facebook pages and groups to stream Q&As and unveil products. For Twitter users, Periscope, Twitter’s live-streaming platform, will appeal to you because of it’s more documentary style content, which is very much like Twitter’s content. For Youtube users, YouTube Live will appeal since many YouTube personalities have already transitioned towards it, so your favourite YouTuber might already be live-streaming. For Instagram users, many of the celebrities you follow on Instagram have already begun streaming themselves live at events. And finally for you, gamers, Twitch is the main platform for streaming video games and is currently the most live-streaming platform out of those few.

Statistics of the percentage of people in the U.S on the internet who have watched/created a stream, courtesy of Statista

Thinking of living the famous Twitch streamer life? Becoming a Twitch streamer is actually extremely simple, it’s the same process as creating a YouTube channel but with extra steps. You’ll have to, first of all, create a Twitch account over at twitch.tv. According to Tom’s Guide (a famous tech website), it’s recommended that if you plan on live-streaming, your computer has the following specs: Intel Core i5–4670 processor, 8 GB of RAM, and a graphics card. If you don’t have the recommended specs, don’t worry, you can actually connect another separate computer to run all the streaming software, making a double PC setup which is what most streamers tend to do. The second important step is to choose a software. Currently, the two most popular software are Open Broadcasting Software and XSplit. Both of which are free and have an extremely simple user interface. The final step is the most complicated, but it’s still a fairly simple process. You’ll have to go to your Twitch account and search through the preferences section to find a code called a streaming key. Once obtaining this streaming key, you’ll go to whichever software you chose, and within the settings of either software, there should be a tab that says broadcasting. Within that tab, input your streaming key and your Twitch account details. After that, you’re set! Click start broadcast, open your channel, and there you are! The rest is up to you to figure out how to stand out from the rest of the streamers, so you can rise to the top and become the next Ninja.

So why should you care about streaming? Well, every social media giant is implementing their own version of live-streaming, so if you have a basic social media account, you'll be exposed to many live-streams as they will be pushing out their platforms to compete with the already large streaming platform, Twitch. Not only that, but live-streaming is beginning to stray away from gaming, broadening the type of audience that watch streams — it’s not just gamers anymore. Streams about music, makeup, and authentic live vlogging are beginning to rise to popularity; in a couple of years, gaming might not even be the most popular type of content that is being live-streamed. However, the main unique quality of live-streaming that distinctly separated itself from other types of media is its authenticity to the viewer. You, the viewer, or you, the streamer, will have an authentic relationship with the viewer/streamer because it’s all done live. Unlike pre-recorded events that only contain highlights, you’ll be together throughout the entire live-streaming experience, and it’ll contain the highlights and the lowlights of the journey, creating an authentic experience., Although right now it’s only a 30 billion dollar industry, it’s expected to double its growth in two years, becoming a 70 billion dollar industry in 2021, according to Business Insider. If you take advantage of it early, who knows, maybe you could be the next Ninja, making millions of dollars for playing games.