My hot take is that, um, oh God, it's going to anger so many people: the worst thing you can do is be in gaming. Gaming pays really bad CPMs. It has a super low total addressable market relative to like any other form of content, and it's super hard to grow, 'cause it's ballistically oversaturated.
Zizin, don't one-guy me; how many people in this directory do you think are making meaningful income playing Path of Exile? Let me count: 1, 2. .
. what? Oh, that's it!
And then after that, nobody. You are literally the top 1% of the top 1% of the top 1%. Oh, gaming works for me.
Dude, shut up; you have hundreds of thousands of views on your YouTube videos. XQC coming in here like, "Who? Well, maybe it could work.
" No, like, nobody is like you. There are, like, how long has K been streaming? DS Ly has been streaming, Gatha has been streaming consistently with tons of hours and never made full-time income, much less these hosers who we don't even hear of.
No, no, no, it's something I've noticed since I've come back, and I've really started looking at content creators. You know what the most damaging thing for content creators is? It's this motherfucker: people that make you believe that this is not only possible but that this is like literally commonplace.
Actually, and they act like it too. But the reality is that you can't use any of these people as a barometer for being content creators, period. You just can't do it.
These are literal exceptions to the rule. It sucks because there are so many hundreds of thousands of people that get into the game because they want to be these types of people. The way that I would equate these people in this day and age is like the trust fund babies, SL, like hedge fund babies of streaming.
Like, Hassan is live a lot, and I don't want to take away from that. Like, Zach is live a lot and really consistent, but the production quality and the amount of effort they physically put into their content is so much lower than what is required to get there. And so, like, it sets a false expectation.
For some reason, like, we super glorify these creators, but we hate hedge fund people, right? We hate people that are low effort on the other side. I don't know why we don't champion people who actually consistently produce like really, really badass content.
I guess those kinds of people are being rewarded. I would say if there was anybody in live streaming right now who has come up really fast and is consistently producing like high production effort content, it would probably be ExtraEmily and then, of course, Kaat. But they're on a short list; it's not that many people.
If you want to actually succeed, you have to be stuff like ExtraEmily is doing. You've got to be cooking steaks in parking lots outside of Denny's and [__] and doing something interesting every single broadcast to pull these kinds of numbers. The reason why you can get 70% growth in this time period is that you're doing some crazy kind of content every single time, and Zizin is actually part of the problem of thinking that it's possible.
Nobody is going to stream Path of Exile and get to his level simply because of like the equity, man. Just the amount of effort and consistency that he's produced over so long at this point, you've got to beat 11 years of authority. Like, it's so hard—11 years of authority.
This guy looks like a meth addict in a $10 room, and then he's talking like, "Oh wow, it's like really easy to be a Path of Exile guy. " But then you go look at someone like Pirate Software—he's been refining himself as an entertainer. He's been figuring out how to EQ his mic so he gets that super deep voice and so on and so on and so on.
So if you want to be these people, it is possible, but you've got to start building the equity at this level. Thor is a master at being an entertainer at this point, right? What's kind of crazy about him, though, is that— and then it's also too—is it's the equity that he put in offline.
That's another thing that's really important, right? It's not just the equity that he put in with just the time into YouTube production and content production; it's also the skills that he learned. So, for example, like, the only reason I have any kind of success as a content creator is because I've literally put millions of dollars into business, advertising, marketing things offline, skill development—so I know what I'm talking about.
And so like, I'm pretty confident I can get a degree of success in the next—I’m pushing for a million subscribers, so I’m going to try to get a million subscribers by the end of [20]2. I’m pretty confident I can do it; we'll see. But that's only going to be predicated not only on the fact that I've been creating content since like 11 years ago, right, and also been refining this.
And I look like a meth addict, except instead of Zizar, and being a meth addict in his house, I'm a meth addict in a forest. But there you have it with P. O.
E. as an example. Is it possible?
A lot of the possible viewers are kind of dried up. In order for someone new to succeed in the space, would it require…? Either new players on POE, or to increase the audience potential, or some other streamer retiring—oh, what a good question that is!
One of the things I was going over with Ziz is, I don’t know if he wants me to talk about this. I think he's fine. Knowing him, he's probably fine.
Darth Microtransaction has proven that POE doesn't need to grow for a quality content creator to rise up. Interesting! That’s a really good point; that might counteract what I was just about to say.
Darth Microtransaction is still farming a ton of data, though, so I’d argue he’s almost in a different market than POE. Look at, like, let’s count the number of videos he’s had since his last POE video: 48, 12, 16, okay, uh, 17. This dude's—I don’t think this dude's a Path of Exile content creator, so I would say that he has a different audience.
He did well on POE—you're 100% right! Zard and I were looking at his YouTube channel and we saw that a huge percentage of Zizar’s YouTube subscribers—like, is it 50%? Zizar already watching are already subscribed to the channel, or what was the stat we saw?
It’s something—yeah, 50%. So it tells me that the total addressable market of Path of Exile is really already invested in the existing content creators, to Sho's point. It doesn’t mean that you can’t be a new creator and break into that audience, but it means that it’s that much harder because of the established authority.
Like, so for example, I guess what I would say is, like, if I want to be a person who’s going to create content about how to play Path of Exile, why would anybody watch me over Ziz? Because Ziz has spent 10 years mastering that topic and he has so much equity—and by equity, I mean, like, his expertise! I literally mean, like, he’s the best in the world at this, right?
So it’s so much harder to break through that because Zizar is, like, one of the content creators who has iterated on his own stuff, gotten better and better and better at it, and he’s created a moat. And so I feel like that’s the case where there’s one of those premium gaming creators in almost every category—at least one of them, right? So if you were to be, like, that’s why I think every content creator should ask themselves the question: Do I have something better to say in this category than whoever is owning the category right now?
So, like, my competitors are Alex Hori and Gary Vee, right? That’s, like, the kind of category that I own, which is, like, marketing, advertising, content creation, business type of stuff. I think that I have a better insight into new platforms than they do, and I think that I’m operating in a space that neither of them do in respect to new marketing ideas.
And so I think I have a unique thing to say, and so I think I can create on that basis. Now, that said, those people have much more equity than I do right now, but when I can talk about things, I think I can continuously talk about things to the point where I may be able to equal that equity. And we’ll see how far my total addressable market goes, but I might—like, Alex is not that huge in the grand scheme of things.
Like, he’s made a lot of stuff, and Alex, for reference, spends $40,000 a month on content, and I spend about $2,500 right now. So he’s coming in at 2. 7 million subscribers with 3,000 videos, and he’s averaging, like, 100 to 200K viewers at this number.
In the finance category, that means that, like, each one of these videos is producing, like, $2,000 to $3,000, or maybe even $4,000. Maybe this is—we have to watch this whole video, by the way. He like, did a bunch of social media platform stuff—we’re going to watch that on stream probably next time.
So, do I think it’s possible for me to hit? Yeah, but that’s the assessment—that’s the calculus that I’m running as a content creator. And I feel like way more people—like, way too many people are going to get into content creation.
They’re like, “Oh yeah, I’m going to be a League of Legends streamer,” but they’ve never run any of the talking points that I’m bringing up right now. Alex specifically said he’d rather make more niche videos because they convert better, rather than videos to get 1 million plus views. I know, and he said that because his monetization strategy isn’t YouTube—just like mine.
So, like, the way that he makes money is through school and through acquisition. com, just like the way that I make money is through Novo. So both of us can make that decision.
Both of us are going to make that decision, right? Like, I’m going to do the same thing. I want to make more niche content that I think appeals to specific people and helps them, rather than making, like, broad-spectrum business stuff that would then sort of lose the message because it has to be diluted.
Okay, so what? Back to the concept that we were talking about before: I just don’t know if gaming as a whole—if there’s, like, any category of gaming that’s not saturated in some way with some content creator, unless you’re willing to, like, go all in on that game and really, really try to produce a ton of content and make—like, look at this— This is 1. 5 thousand videos just about Path of Exile, and like Zizin, likewise, is at 2.
7 thousand videos. This is a huge investment in content creation over one game, and I would say that if you want to succeed in one game, this is what it takes, right? If you want to be like a super, super authority on a single game, then the vast majority of gaming creators that I talk to and that make games want to reach that level of success, but they want to jump around to other games.
Let's talk about a brand new game; let's take Throne in Liberty. Do you want to be a Throne in Liberty content creator? You might be able to get started now, but it's going to take you like two to 300 videos to really become an authority on that.
And then what happens if the game dies, like it did in Korea? So this is my problem with gaming influencers: you're totally beholden to the game's success, which is a huge problem. Your entire business model relies on the game's success.
And number two, you have to be insane enough to love that game to the extent that you can produce 200 videos about it. All of the people these days that are variety creators and are attached to gaming—I don't think that Asmongold is a gaming influencer at all. And if you don't believe me, let’s go look at what his YouTube videos do.
Asmongold is a drama and SL news influencer that plays video games. So, it's not about gaming. Not about gaming.
Not about P. Diddy. What happened to TV shows?
P. Diddy again? Doc Workor situation.
Actual game does half as well as his other videos because it's 200k versus 600k. Unreal Engine, which is about news. Finally, some good news about the cougar epidemic: young men dating older women, 120 new victims.
Another P. Diddy video, right? This is a news influencer who plays video games.
The fact that people say that Zach is a gaming influencer is crazy to me. Let's talk about Moist Critical; same thing. Most embarrassing movie of the year: Joker 2 is an F—it sucks.
Nintendo might sue P. Diddy—who knows what this is about? Might be gaming.
Actually, Nintendo is being evil. Sony hates Bloodborne. Delusional AI artists.
Um, is there anything worth watching right now? The vast majority of, again, this is a guy who makes news and drama videos and plays video games. This would be like saying that I'm a gaming influencer.
I play a ton of video games, but nothing that I cover is about it, right? So the point is, we use these people as the gold standard of where a gaming influencer can go in terms of their success, and yet none of these people are actually gaming influencers. XQC is the same thing, right?
Like Hanan ABI is the same thing. None of these people are actually gaming influencers. All that is to say that I just don't think that the vast majority of people are set up to be gaming influencers, because how many people are willing to put in the effort to make the 2,000 or 3,000 videos that Zarin has made?
How many of them are willing to even make 300 videos about the same thing? 300 videos is a crazy amount of videos, right? 3,000 is an unimaginable amount of videos.
For my channel, I have been making videos; I have 356 videos. A lot of those are shorts now, so really it looks more like 200 videos or something like that. I feel like I've made a load of videos.
Am I willing to talk about marketing for another 700 videos? You bet your ass I’m willing to. But once you get down into this other stuff, it’s a lot of work, dog.
So I think that just the vast majority of people are not ready for what it takes to be a gaming influencer.
