Three out of four Kiwi kids see streaming as a viable career option. What does that sentence even mean!? Bruce Munro takes a deep dive in the swift-flowing online-video-communities river to see what streaming is all about.
Rudeism’s breakthrough moment came when he live-streamed himself playing the first-person shooter video game Overwatch using bananas as video controllers.
"I got a bunch of bananas from the supermarket and stuck a bunch of wires in them," 31-year-old Rudeism, AKA Dylan Beck, says.
"Just by touching the bananas it would let me move around and aim and shoot.
"It got posted to the very top of [social media news discussion site] Reddit. That was when things really started to take off."
That was late-2016. Now, the former-Dunedin video game developer has a niche market in the global $100 billion-a-year video streaming industry. He also has more than 54,000 online followers from around the globe and a decent income from his regular streaming activities.
"I’m having fun and I’m passionate about what I’m doing," the Christchurch daytime game developer and weekend video streamer says.
Mention streamers and a certain demographic will think wistfully of rainbow-coloured crepe paper party decorations. From their sixth birthday. Sometime back in the plasticine era.
For others, however — those born clutching smart phones and dreams of climate catastrophe survival — streamers are people. People who live-stream video of themselves doing all manner of things, which others watch, chat about online in real time and pay real money to support. People, the most popular of whom have followings two and three times larger than the population of New Zealand, earning them millions of dollars a year. Achieved by videoing themselves doing stuff for eager audiences. That probably include your offspring.
All of which is presented to soften the blow of the next sentence.
A new survey has revealed that 75% of young Kiwis see streaming as a viable job.
Broken down, so shocked minds can digest each lump: the survey ... commissioned by technology firm Logitech New Zealand ... shows that three out of every four New Zealanders aged 10 to 18 ... think that when they finish their education ... they might like to pursue a career ... as a one-person television channel.
You thought kids wanted to become police officers, brain surgeons or, heaven forbid, pop stars. No, they want to be streamers.
It is no wonder you are so badly mistaken. You thought laptops and smart phones were for on-the-go consumption of the six o’clock news, past episodes of The Chase and, if you’re feeling self-indulgent, a half hour, lunchtime slurp of an online movie. Tweens’ and teens’ top three online watches are, however, in reverse order, comedy (50%), music videos (54%) and, drumroll, streamers (62%). And many of these young things spend multiple hours devouring their content, every day.
So, what is it, this streaming phenomenon?
The bulk of it can loosely be termed gaming — watching live video of people playing video games. Globally, the top streamer is American Ninja, AKA Richard Blevins, whose 17.3 million followers like nothing better than to watch him give running commentary while he saves humans from Fortnite zombies, kills humans on Apex Legends islands or blasts aliens hiding on giant, habitable Halo space weapons.
Ninja can be found primarily on the Twitch platform. The other main streaming platform, getting bigger by the day, is YouTube.
But there is no need to be a good gamer to attract followers on Twitch or YouTube. Absolutely not, Jasteria, AKA Janelle Bradley (30), of Christchurch, says.
"I’m bad at video games," the self-titled Trash Queen says.
"But you don’t have to be good at them. It’s not the point. People turn up for you."
And gaming is only one genre in the streamer multi-verse. There are streamers who specialise in music, talk shows and sports. There is travel, chatting, food and drink ...
The key is finding your special niche, Rudeism says.
Raised in Invercargill and educated in computer science at the University of Otago, his first flirtation with what would become "his thing" was playing vehicular soccer video game Rocket League using a Guitar Hero controller. From there, he experimented with using feet pads from a dance video game to play World of Warcraft, before his big break came with the banana controllers. Since then, there have been teacup controllers (activated by sipping a hot brew), baguette sniper rifles, a motion-activated goose costume ...
"I kind of got lucky," Rudeism says.
"Because I fell into something that others weren’t doing."
Rudeism is seventh on the New Zealand streamers’ leaderboard. Gamers occupy third and second place: Quin69 with 659,000 followers and Fitz with one million. But Aotearoa’s undisputed sovereign of stream is Broxh, the woodcarver.
Streamers are quickly growing in popularity and influence, helped along by a global pandemic bent on channelling people indoors and online.
Jasteria, who is a retail warehouse operations manager 32 hours a week and a chatty, Just Dance (think, the karaoke of dance) streamer more than 25 hours a week, dabbled in streaming for a couple of years before taking the dive in 2019. She has 3100 followers, and climbing, mostly from the northern hemisphere.
"The viewership on Twitch as a whole, not just my channel, shot up as soon as this pandemic happened," Jasteria says.
"A lot of people ... being in the US and the UK, they don’t want to leave their houses unless absolutely necessary. It’s a lot more chaotic over there."
If your mind is not already spinning its wheels, failing to gain traction at the thought of myriad youth worldwide eschewing sunshine and skateboards for watching someone else romp about in virtual reality, just wait until you add the financial factor.
Taikawa Tamati-Elliffe is a busy man. The 27-year-old works fulltime as the Maori partnerships and pathways manager for the New Zealand Centre of Digital Excellence (Code), the Dunedin outfit tasked with helping the country create a $1 billion video game development industry. He also has his own business start-up, Ngati Gaming, is studying at the University of Otago and recently became a dad. Oh, yes, and he is a streamer. He has a small following, 628 people, but it is growing and is already generating revenue.
"I’ve been able to use the money I was getting through Twitch to invest in ... better quality content for my [online] community," Taikawa, who goes by his first name in the streaming world, says.
Twitch streamers can make money through subscriptions, donations, advertisements and sponsorships. Subscriptions start at $7.99 a month.
Rudeism does not say how much he is earning from streaming, only that when his partner lost her job in the first Covid lockdown it became their "other income".
"It’s definitely gotten us through the last couple of years."
Average viewership can give a rough guide to monthly income. It has been estimated that streamers with an average viewership of 1000 per stream are earning $7500 a month and those with 10,000 viewers are banking $45,000 a month.
In 2020, Broxh earned international respect when, as his subscriptions skyrocketed, he started telling followers to hold on to their money and "use it on your family, not me".
Last year, the highest paid streamers, PewDiePie and Ninja, earned $30 million and $38 million respectively.
How does this all make any possible sense?
By looking beneath the shooting and shouting, beneath the incessant banter and needless novelty, at what is going on inside this sometimes tawdry cocoon.
A nascent form of global community is gestating.
"They just enjoy hanging out. Whether it’s by making fun of me while I stream a game, or being in voice chat in community games, I think they’re all just there for a sense of community."
"We are using gaming as a tool to teach te reo Maori," Taikawa says.
"We have a ... chat room ... a space to practice. We are very protective of our community.
"It is a safe space to ask any cultural or language questions ... without the fear of getting your head bitten off by an Auntie at the marae," he adds with a laugh.
"It’s now a significant part of a lot of people’s lives," Rudeism says of streaming.
"If you can find the right [streamer community], one that is welcoming and positive and nurturing, then that can be great.
"There’s been moments in my community when people have had a rough time and others have been there to help them and get them through it. That’s pretty awesome.
"It’s a powerful platform for human connection, which is really important."
In discombobulated times, it seems many streamers are responding to a vast demand for a sense of belonging. Perhaps the Government’s steam-locomotive-slow plan to place 12,000 youth mental health workers in the workforce could be given bullet train treatment by offering the country’s 100 most popular streamers a free, online, mental-health-basics bootcamp and a monthly retainer for their services.
Of course, the streaming world is not all kittens and encouragement.
Sometimes, you accidentally wander in to an unusual neighbourhood.
Littleshia (pronounced "little-see-ha", so you can name drop her with your grandkids) used to live in New Zealand but is now US-based and has 157,000 followers.
Her main thing is "dancing and being very loud". This month, however, the lithe streamer’s viewers have been making donations tagged to requests for something else.
"People have been gifting me subs all week just to watch me do chores," Littleshia tells viewers.
"I don’t know why. I’m just kinda going with it," she says before proceeding to steam clean her drapes while watchers type hundreds of scrolling comments.
Other times, safe corners are invaded by malevolent forces.
"You do get trolls coming in to your chat," Jasteria says.
On Twitch, last year, it got quite bad for a while, she says.
"There were a lot of hate raids. People and bots ... saying hateful bigoted stuff."
Software has been created to identify and ban the bots, but some of it still goes on.
"It can be quite nasty. I tell my community, ‘Just ignore them, do not give them anything. My moderators will deal with them’."
Overall, despite those shadows over the streamersphere, there is a concerted effort by most streamers and followers to make it their "happy place". And to let that happiness leak back into the real world.
Taikawa is streaming to help revitalise te reo Maori. Rudeism is developing fun controllers, such as his morse code Dark Souls III controller — "I beat the whole game using a single button to tap morse code commands" — to highlight accessibility issues. Last May, Jasteria was part of an international Twitch dance team, Center Stage, organised by Littleshia, that ran a four-day, live-streamed, dance-a-thon, raising $200,000 for the renowned St Jude Children’s Research Hospital, in the US.
So, what to make of it all?
The survey that unleashed the prospect of a generation of wannabe streamers — (We can now flash that term around with a knowledgeable nonchalance that shows just how "down with the young ones" we really are.) — that survey, also asked parents whether they thought streaming was a viable career.
Thirty one percent of parents said "no" and 14% said "What’s streaming?". But 55% of parents said "Yes".
The result even surprises a streamer as seasoned as Rudeism.
"That’s a lot higher than I expected it to be. That’s really surprising. Over half, wow."
But before all you parents rush off to urge your offspring to become high-flyers in this exotic new field of endeavour, Rudeism has a word of warning that makes streaming sound all too familiar.
"There is definitely a career to be made there ... I think the thing that gets overlooked is how much work goes in to it.
"It requires a lot of skills and determination.
"If you want to get in to this industry, you have to be prepared to put in a lot of hard work."
