This past Monday provided Aspen and I with a fresh opportunity to attempt a marathon stream on Twitch. Of course the last time we hosted a marathon stream was our 24-hour broadcast that left us battered and broken and excited for more. The Games and Grinds channel has grown quite a bit for the better of the past few months, and this Monday was a great time to put ourselves to the test. Our marathon may have been “only” 12 hours long, but we still learned a great deal while streaming, gaming with viewers, and cooking up a set of tasty dishes. Here is a quick breakdown of what we learned from our Memorial Day marathon:
Hawaii Standard Time may be the worst possible time-zone for streaming.
This isn’t exactly a new observation, but it was certainly something that was came up during this marathon. Hawaii’s time zone is 6 hours behind the east coast, and 3 hours behind the west coast. That large of a gap in time zones can make it incredibly difficult to match up our broadcast times with the availability of viewers. Sure, there are people online worldwide, but Monday we absolutely noticed a dip in viewers as we approached and passed 2:00 pm local Hawaii time. We see this phenomena fairly often with our weekly Tues/Thurs streams. By the time we get home from work and settled in to stream it’s already around midnight on the east coast. It’s difficult to build an audience while keeping those kinds of hours. Difficult, but not impossible.
Social media is the key to working around our time zone and building our channel.
A marathon stream with a smaller channel feels akin to fishing. A lot of time is spent entertaining yourself, hoping you can hook something to make your efforts worth the time. While we certainly had moments with a steady influx of viewers, we also went through dead periods with an utterly empty chatroom. After the marathon Aspen and I had a quick chat to discuss how we could improve our time-to-viewer ratio and one of the key improvements we figured we could make is to increase our social media presence while streaming. We have a Twitter account tied to our channel, we might as well use them outside of the occasional auto-post when we first go online.
If the fish aren’t biting your lone hook, throw a net out there and give the fish nowhere to hide. Given the plights of our time zone listed above, we can’t exactly afford to sit and wait for viewers to come to us. We have to go out and find them. To accomplish this we have to more or less live-tweet each of our broadcasts so we can fully promote our channel. It’ll take some effort to find the right balance between social-media, gaming, and viewer-interaction, but the results should prove to be worth it.
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