EPTIn the following weeks I have found that my concurrent viewership has dropped dramatically (from 25-30 to 10-12). I can't think of a reason why exactly, there are two things that have changed which may have caused it, although I'm not certain.
1. Not having an overlay or any sort of graphics present on the channel or any of my social media. After Clarity shut down I was anticipating new graphics to appear quickly, and then when everything went downhill I was faced with either making my own (which would require time I don't have) or wait for a new team to pick me up. IvD has since picked me up and I now have current graphics pasted all over my related pages.
2. I have never used army hotkeys and for the last two weeks I've been playing unranked and grinding out as many games as possible. It has worked amazingly, but as my goal was to learn hotkeys, I wasn't concerned with winning so my play was pretty poor. Maybe no one was interested in watching this, but it was something I had to do.
Just a side note on the hotkeys. This is actually pretty important to me as I didn't think I'd actually be able to do it. Now that I've started I find that I've opened a door to improving my play even more, getting me closer to my goal of masters. I am pretty proud of myself right now.
Last week I signed on to IvD gaming. It was setup through Sean "Kuren" McCoskey who is a well known observer for NA tournaments and who is also on IvD. He visits my stream fairly regularly and has become a great friend. We try to bump each others work on Twitter, and are always hoping for each other to succeed. I ended up on a Skype call last Friday night for 2hrs with "itsdyne" and "yogi" who are the owners and operators of IvD and it went great. I got along great with them and they have some fantastic ideas moving forward. I will be doing web admin work for them as well as some light graphical work. Same repsonsibilities I had with oG and Clarity. They are also willing to help me out to grow my stream and possibly run a tournament or even do some interviews or colour commentary. It's quite exciting actually. They said I had a great voice and spoke well and they would be willing to give me a shot.
Some ideas I've had to grow viewership are...
On my "out of game" overlay I now I have kitchen fridge where I will be posting all of my kids StarCraft related artwork. They continue to just draw stuff on their own accord so I figure I'd put it on the fridge for all to see. I've created an imgur album - http://imgur.com/a/BNTsC - which will detail their work and give some background info on them as well.
I am toying with the idea of playing an older game for about 20-30mins about halfway through each stream where I can share old games that I used to play to the younger crowd. It won't be a review show but just a "Hey guys, here is a game I played when I was young. Check it out". After each showing, the viewers vote on whether or not they would like to see more next session or if I should bring another game to the table. I think this would increase viewer interaction as well as give them a sense of belonging and something to look forward to.
I'm trying to also change up the music. I find a lot of music is the same from stream to stream, and I'd like to be different while it being enjoyable as well. Haven't really thought much about it, it's just popped into my head yesterday.
It's been a while since I've written. I'll try to do it again soon and report back how these ideas go over.
