How to become a popular streamer from scratch

MAY 19, 2023 • INFLUENCER MARKETING • EXPERT OPINION

Twitch is a popular streaming platform that is visited by more than 2,5 million people daily. Many streamers build their entire careers on Twitch, become famous and earn good money. In this article we will talk about the instruments that will send your streams to the top, accelerate the growth of your channel, and open up content monetization opportunities.

How to start earning on Twitch
Let’s start a stream!
Automating actions
Is artificial follower boosting worth it?

How to start earning on Twitch

Twitch is one of the most feature-reach and trending streaming services in the world. Content creators get access to gigantic audiences, technologies for their content promotion, and several streaming income sources at once.

You can make money from donations and advertising, and also from your follower count: the higher it is, the larger payment share Twitch gives to content creators. The platform does not take commission on donations, and your share of advertising revenue will be higher than on YouTube.

According to Twitch Tracker, 94670 channels on average are streamed simultaneously in April 2023.

But how do you turn streaming from a hobby into an exciting job with a stable income? More than 94 thousand channels on average are streamed online simultaneously in April 2023. Will anyone find your stream among countless others? Frankly, it is unlikely without active promotion measures, as your viewer count will be close to nought when you begin.

Can I develop my channel by myself?

Gone are the times when an aspiring streamer needed only to find their creative niche and publish content regularly to be successful. Your channel won’t simply grow together with the platform, and developing it becomes even trickier because Twitch has almost no organic traffic that would lead viewers to you, or paid-for promotion tools.

You can attract more viewers using the following methods:

External sources. Announcements and ads of your streams can attract viewers. Of course, you need access to large audiences on other resources (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Telegram) in the first place.
Raids of other streamers. This is a dream of every aspiring streamer, but will famous streamers agree to a raid with you? Realistically, this is unlikely: why would they give free promotion to somebody with minimal following they do not know?
Getting into top streams. This is the most efficient way to grow your audience, as viewers will join your stream in the category that’s interesting to them by themselves. However, streams with low viewer count will be placed at the bottom of the livestream list, and only a handful of viewers will invest their time into looking for your specific stream.

A self-evident conclusion from this is that it is very hard to attract a sufficient amount of viewers to your first stream just by yourself, unless you have a lot of money, personal connections, or your own media resources.

How to promote your Twitch channel

There is countless advice on promoting your Twitch channel out there, ranging from attracting viewers through streaming freshly released games to running contests and challenges. You can often hear that you need to look for your niche among small indie projects, and grow your own loyal audience using their fan bases.

Yes, these recommendations can be useful, especially if you’re a fan of doing a lot more work and spending countless hours doing marathon runs in fresh titles to get your potential followers’ attention. Otherwise you run a very real risk of getting a severe case of burnout while hype-chasing.

Artificial follower boosting and other forms of fake engagement

Unfortunately, the work of many aspiring streamers ends up being tiresome and ultimately futile, as they do not seem to get a chance to be seen by their audience they need to become successful. This is why different forms of boosting and fake engagement are popular.

Artificially boosting your follower/viewer count can help you temporarily reach the top of:

all the streams;
Twitch main page recommendations;
recommendation lists for specific categories;
live streams in the Discover section.

Not only will an artificial viewers boost increase all major indicators of your channel and the current stream, but it also will grow your loyal audience, as a percentage of users who will have noticed your stream will follow your channel, provided that you manage to raise their interest with high-quality content.

Then the social proof principle starts working in your favor: people are much more likely to join the streams of users in recommendations, and are more eager to follow channels with larger online presence.

What Twitch rules say

Twitch frowns upon different forms of fake engagement and fights policy violations based on user reports. Octo Browser, however, allows you to create dozens of additional accounts that are indistinguishable from other viewers on the platform. In contrast to resorting to the help of third-party services, only you will be in control of your accounts, and they will not attract unwanted attention.

Each Octo Browser profile is a separate browser window that can imitate any user activity. Profiles can visit streams and send chat messages. Therefore, safe viewership boosting with Octo Browser can help solve several problems at once for both beginning and experienced bloggers alike.

Let’s start a stream!

We decided to give Octo Browser a go ourselves and see if our colleague Sid Wudraq can become a successful streamer in the shortest possible time using Octo Browser. We decided to start with accumulating our first viewers and getting an opportunity to monetize our channel.

We used a MacBook Air M1 running Twitch Studio for our stream, and a Core i5-12600K | RTX 3060 12GB | 32GB running Octo Browser to boost our viewer count. We created 100 Octo Browser profiles and added separate Socks5 proxies with IPv4 addresses to each profile.

You don’t have to create dozens of Twitch accounts to boost your viewership count; it is enough to visit a channel from a unique device with a unique IP address. However, we wanted to give powerful features of Octo Browser a test, and so we used a script to automatically authenticate pre-registered Twitch accounts and make them go to our stream. After we started the script, we simply watched each launched profile boost our viewership count.

System resource consumption when running 30 Octo Browser profiles.

Something we didn’t account for when preparing this test was that concurrent views of a stream using many profiles can lead to a noticeable Internet connection speed drop. In our case, our 9.5 Mbps connection hit its limit with 30 concurrently run streams. The lesson: take this parameter into account when planning the number of profiles necessary for the boost.

You can downgrade the stream video resolution quality to increase the number of running profiles. When we set the resolution to 160p, we were able to increase the number of viewers to 50.

First results

After just an hour since the start of the stream, Sid Wudraq’s channel reached the Top 4 of Terraria streams. Additionally, it fulfilled several requirements for becoming a Twitch Affiliate, which opens up the way to stream monetization.

Reaching Terraria Top 4.

How can I monetize my Twitch?

The Twitch Affiliate status gives a stream access to the main built-in options for content monetization: paid subscriptions, Bits donations, and Ad Breaks.

To join the Affiliate program you need to fulfill several conditions:

An average of 3 or more stream viewers simultaneously
At least 500 total stream minutes in the last 30 days
At least 7 unique broadcast days in the last 30 days
At least 50 followers of your channel

Our Path to Affiliate

Our channel is now eligible!

The Twitch Partnership Program opens up even more ways to attract viewers and even more monetization options.

The requirements to become a Twitch Partner are:

Accumulate an average of 75 unique stream viewers
Broadcast for at least 25 hours in the last 30 days
Broadcast on 12 unique days

Partners receive a check next to their nickname, which sets them apart from other streamers and gives an enormous popularity boost. Income distribution from paid subscriptions changes to 70/30, with 70% going to the content creators, and Twitch pays for any banking fees and commissions. Large advertisers are eager to work with Twitch Partners, and, as a result, streamers’ income multiplies.

Automating actions

The current Octo Browser API allows you to automate many recurrent account and profile actions. It is much easier to accumulate viewers for your stream if you use a Twitch authorization script and automatically direct your accounts to the channel you need. Moreover, you can automate your bots to perform more complicated and detailed actions: e.g., you can automate subscriptions to certain channels, giving likes, posting comments, and performing other activities.

Octo Browser with the proxies configured.

We have created a script that automates creating profiles and adding proxies to Octo Browser. You can simply run this script, and the necessary amount of profiles will be ready to go.

JS script for creating profiles:

Expand

^<script>
^{const axios = require('axios'); //import Axios library for requests}
^{const fs = require('fs'); //import fs library for file reading/writing}
^{const path = require('path'); //import path for building correct paths to txt files}
^{let accounts = []; //variable for accounts data}
^{const accountsPath = path.join(__dirname, 'accounts.txt'); //path to file with accounts data(accounts.txt)}
^{const profilesPath = path.join(__dirname, 'profiles.txt') //path to file where profiles data will be written (profiles.txt)}
^{fs.readFile(accountsPath, async function (err, data) { //reading accounts.txt}
^{accounts = data.toString().split("\r\n"); //cutting data by start of string and end of string}
^{for (i in accounts) { //start of cycle, cycle will run for as long as we have strings with accounts}
^{let proxyData = {}; //variable for proxy data}
^{const [login, password, protocol, ip, port, proxyLogin, proxyPassword] = accounts[i].split(";"); // slicing string by ; symbol ;}
^{const splittedAccount = accounts[i].split(";"); // varibale for checking length of string (5 values, 7 values)}
^{let numberOfString = parseInt(i) + 1;}
^{const OCTO_REMOTE_API = axios.create({ // creating instance of axios for requests to external Octo API}
^{baseURL: 'https://app.octobrowser.net/api/v2/automation/',}
^{timeout: 2000,}
^{headers: {}
^{'X-Octo-Api-Token': 'Token' //paste your API Token here}
^}
^});
^{if (splittedAccount.length === 7) { //if string contains login and password for proxy}
^{proxyData = {}
^{type: protocol,}
^{port: port,}
^{host: ip,}
^{login: proxyLogin,}
^{password: proxyPassword,}
^}
^{} else if (splittedAccount.length === 5) { //if string doesn't contain login and password for proxy}
^{proxyData = {}
^{type: protocol,}
^{port: port,}
^{host: ip,}
^}
^{} else {}
^{console.error("???? Check your accounts.txt file. The string number " + numberOfString + " doesn't contain 5 or 7 elements. It should contain 5 or 7 elements. ");}
^}
^{async function createProfile() { //async function for creating profiles}
^{return OCTO_REMOTE_API.post(`/profiles`, {}
^{title: login + " Twitch " + i, // necessesary field, title of profile}
^{description: login + ' ' + password + ' Twitch', // description of profile}
^{tags: ["twitch", "in work"], // adding tags, they should be created before this action}
^{proxy: proxyData, // proxy data, with or without login and password}
^{fingerprint: {}
^{os: "win", // necessesary field, Windows profile}
^},
^{}).then((response) => response.data).catch((error) => {}
^{const errorData = error.response.data || error.message}
^{console.error(errorData)}
^})
^}
^{const response = await createProfile(); //waiting for the create profiles function to complete}
^{let uuid = response.data.uuid; //setting profile uuid}
^{console.log(login + " DONE!✅"); //message to console with login + DONE!}
^{//Below we should set UUID + LOGIN + PASSWORD into profiles.txt, which we will use later for launching profiles}
^{fs.appendFile(profilesPath, (uuid + ";" + login + ";" + password) + "\r\n", async function (error) {}
^{if (error) throw error;}
^});
^}
^});
^</script>

Contents of the file "accounts.txt".

You can find our documentation regarding automation and API here.

Is artificial follower boosting worth it?

Really making it on the streaming services today is not easy. It is not enough to understand your audience’s interests well and create high-quality content, but you also need to stand out among tens of thousands of other streamers.

Not only can boosting your viewership increase your popularity and income from donations and ads, but it also might even land you a contract with the streaming service itself. The Partnership program opens up further monetization options that can help you earn even more.

Octo Browser is a universal multi-accounting instrument that gives you full control over the process and quality of your viewership boosting. You promote your channel yourself without resorting to the help of non-transparent or dubious third parties and services, and the platform cannot detect any policy infringements.