Author: CazzPhoenix

The trouble with morals

Don’t worry, despite its title this is still gaming related.

For the past month or so I’ve been streaming fairly regularly on twitch. I’m pretty proud of myself for doing so. It has helped me to be a little more outgoing and I’ve managed to gain about 5 followers a week. It’s  not much but it is something and I only announce it to followers on twitter and Facebook friends. That is where my moral dilemma lies.

I recently watched a streamer gain 40 followers in a couple hours. How did he do this? Well, I know part is due to his personality but he also had the incentive of a $20 giveaway. I don’t spam forums or people directly with links to my stream and I don’t do giveaways. I feel like it cheapens things and pads the follower count with people that just want freebies. The thing is, I watched the count go from 60 to 100 and the viewers from 5 to 50. The chat became active with people talking amongst themselves and the guy streaming was admittedly not able to keep up. That’s incredible because when I first found his channel he had 1 viewer. After the giveaway happened I expected the numbers to drop drastically both viewers and followers but as of this moment he’s sitting at 110 followers and the viewer count didn’t drop until he switched games. That means it worked, and it worked very well. I checked his twitter account today expecting him to already have hundreds or thousands of followers that he could advertise to but he had 25. He also didn’t mention the giveaway in the title of the stream. I think what happened is the 5 people in chat, myself included, did all of the work getting the word out for the giveaway and stream. So the question is… should I do the same? It’s basically like paying for advertising. That’s not bad… it’s marketing.