This is a post I've been wanting to address for quite some time. I realize that many of the active users on Steem may not be into streaming or watching streamers at all and it might be a new thing for them. It is a fact that it is a rising market though and Twitch has been the leading platform ever since the early beginnings of this activity. Even though many here may not agree nor do they see the importance of users being able to stream through Steem on platforms such as Vimm.tv much of the younger viewers do understand it.
Vimm.tv is fairly new and in alpha, it relies on a 12% beneficiary reward as of now so that's the number I will go with when comparing it to Twitch. This post is to make it a bit more clear of how different it is for a streaming platform to exist on a centralized platform such as Twitch or a platform built on a decentralized network such as Steem.
There are four major ways for streamers to earn on Twitch, the first one is:
Donations
On Twitch viewers can directly donate money to streamers with a credit card or Paypal. Twitch used to some times take 1% off of that but it wasn't always the case, even so Paypal has it's own fees which usually are 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. Imagine that if you want to donate $1 to your favorite streamer he would only receive around $0.66 effectively losing 33% of its value. After much complaints from streamers Twitch decided to eliminate the middlemen and create their own currency to handle donations. Oh wow! Twitch is so awesome! Wait, instead of the streamer having to lose a big cut of the donation, people who now wanted to buy their ironically named centralized currency "bits" have to pay 40% more for the value these bits hold. If you want to donate $10 to your favorite streamer you'd have to spend $14. Fun, right? Not only are there a ton of rules involved with what you can do with your bits and how you can ask for them but Twitch is taking a 40% cut all the way through from people wanting to donate making it more acceptable to go back to Paypal.
How does that work on Steem? Oh right, zero fees for transactions. If you want to send someone $1 in SBD, he will receive exactly $1 in SBD, end of discussion.
Ads
Every time someone (without adblock) opens up your stream for the first time they get an ad they gotta watch through, the streamer makes a tiny percentage of this adrevenue. As a partner with Twitch they also get a so called "ad button", they can press this button to show an ad to all of their current viewers by the click of a button. You're going for a quick bio break? Ad! Gonna go have a quick cigarette? Ad! Long loading screen coming up in the game you're playing? AD AD AD! With this Ad button they generate a lot more revenue.
As of right now there are no advertisements on Vimm.tv and neither on Steem the same way*.
I say the same way because people can advertise things through posts on Steem or buy buying votes or using the "promotions" tab where they pay SBD to be listed there which gets burned in the @null account effectively making Steem/SBD more scarce and indirectly raising the value of all investors holding Steem Power. Not going to get into this part too much cause I both lack the exact knowledge of the technicalities behind it and I think it would require a whole post of its own. Let's just say we have no ads similar to Twitch and other platforms.
Subscriptions
On Twitch people can buy a subscription which gives them certain badges that show up behind their username in chat and allows them the use of certain emojis and custom emojiss of the streamer they are subscribed to. The subscriptions cost $5 but have two other higher tiers which at this point in time pretty much only give you access to more emojis (I know it's pretty dumb). But hey, you'll also get a notification to your email when your streamer comes online! Guess how much Twitch takes from the $5 subscription cost? FIFTY FUCKING PERCENT.
On Steem we basically have Gina bot that's been free to use in forever and gives you a lot of notifications which you can adjust in many ways and we will hopefully get "yotifications" on Steemit.com :soon:.
On Vimm.tv I am sure there is a notification alert, what their plans are with emojis and if that will ever cost is yet unknown but I doubt they will start taking 50% for themselves.
Sponsorships
Last but not least, sponsorships. This is something that might occur on Steem a lot more than the rest of the methods listed above. On Twitch streamers occasionally get sponsored by companies to stream for a game they want to advertise. For instance if you happen to see a few big time streamers play the same game on Twitch one day it might be that they've received a sponsorship to do so. They are legally required to make it clear that they are getting paid for playing that game by the Federal Trade Commission. This is were the big money comes in and it usually goes to the streamers with the most viewers since they have most of the visibility.
The reason I said that these activities can happen a lot more on Steem is because it is quite easy in this day and age, even to avoid the FTC's laws. Someone can for instance contact you telling you that you'll get $1k for writing a positive post for an ICO or product on your Steem blog. Even though most authors have the decency to make it clear that the post in question is paid promotion, some do not. The reason I said it's easy in this day and age to not make it public that someone has paid you to advertise their product is because crypto is making things a lot more hard to track. Currencies such as Monero and other privacy focused ones are a general go to when handling such activities, of course just sending someone coins to their exchange directly is also more than enough to not risk someone finding out about it.
On Steem these sponsorships can happen in many ways, people can write something positive about you in hopes of getting paid by you through an upvote. People can make deals with you that if you give them part of your post rewards they will vote on your post instead of vote-trading with someone else. That is if they don't already have most of their voting power delegated to a bid bot. All of these occur mostly due to post rewards being 75% and curators being a smaller and smaller part of the platform due to the incentive for a higher ROI being so much lower. Oh well, we can only improve from here on out, I hope.
Anyway, in my opinion it is not going to take a lot for a decent competitor to show up and out compete Twitch and their centralized monopoly of streamers and viewers. It would be really awesome if that happened on Steem and I am looking forward to see how Vimm.tv develops to take that role. I am okay with their beneficiaries and so should you be, if something looks too good to be true it might prove itself to not be (cough, dlive, cough). If anything it showed that all the rewards the streamers earned during its time were still theirs because Steem is decentralized and no one can take your rewards away from you. I am hoping to see some healthy competitions in many of the existing dapps on Steem and most importantly for them to take down the current centralized and greedy giants taking full advantage of their positions.
