The Hardest Working Man in the WoW Streaming Space

Asmongold has mastered the art of playing an archetype.

He plays up the role of the sweaty shut-in MMO gamer, while in reality he is entertaining and corralling thousands of concurrent chatters in a very scientific manner.

(For the uninitiated; chat on Twitch is a hive mind of sorts, since thousands of people are vying for one person's attention through a text box, so a wave of similar messages are most likely to get through. I mean the term corralling quite literally, when a streamer say "Drakes" in the chat a wall of Drake gifs roll in for example).

This archetype/character that Asmongold plays gives people something familiar to look forward to, or as another of my favorite streamers, Kripp says:

I try to keep the schedule regular, right? if im gonna stream at that time and, and i always do something at that time, i try to keep doing it at that time so people tuning in at that time can know what to expect.

THE QUEST FOR ATHISSA - Hearthstone Battlegrounds - YouTube

The top streamers are very intentional with their brand, though the brand itself may have been forged by an emergent relationship with their community (ex: coffee cow, back to paris, wow is dead type content, etc).

This intention is reflected in their content, which creates a fascinating flywheel-type business model.

As a medium, the internet is defined by a built-in performance incentive. In real life, you can walk around living life and be visible to other people. But you can’t just walk around and be visible on the internet—for anyone to see you, you have to act.

Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino

The Streaming Business Model

Many streamers hire VoD editors from within their communities. Hiring from within their communities is of utmost importance because:

  1. editors must understand the pacing and "inside jokes" from the streamer community, and
  2. they must like the streamer enough to do this work daily

The role of these VoD editors are to take the funniest, most salient clips from their long form streams and upload them to platforms like YouTube as standalone content.

These videos serve as fuel to find new fans which feed back into the community by chatting, which create funnier videos, which brings in more fans etc. creating a flywheel effect.

The only non-renewable resource in this wheel is the streamer having to consistently show up to stream for their fans and provide hours of high energy content in front of a camera.

(NB: but let's put a pin in this for now in 2022, because V-Tubers are starting to become more and more common and V-Tubing is a much more sustainable form of streaming).

Once a day, after you’ve done your day’s work, go back to your documentation and find one little piece of your process that you can share. Where you are in your process will determine what that piece is. If you’re in the very early stages, share your influences and what’s inspiring you. If you’re in the middle of executing a project, write about your methods or share works in progress. If you’ve just completed a project, show the final product, share scraps from the cutting-room floor, or write about what you learned. If you have lots of projects out into the world, you can report on how they’re doing—you can tell stories about how people are interacting with your work.

Show Your Work!, Austin Kleon

Introspectively, I also look for incidental byproducts from my main work, and find the most Judo way to integrate it into my workflows. A good example is the "Read this next" section below the blogs. In reality it uses the lodash sample API to retrieve three random posts, but it serves a route to increase the value of older content.

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