Livestreaming: Where Everyone Feels Trapped

You have some free time, so you decide to tune into your favorite streamer’s livestream. As you click on the video, you see the time duration—it seems that they have been streaming for six hours straight. The video becomes fullscreen, and to the right, you can see that their chat is flooded with endless amounts of comments and donations. Sending a tier-one gift is around $5, but as the tiers and gift types change, prices can rack up higher and higher. You wonder how streamers can stay up for hours at a time, playing the same game for months on end and always being online when you are.

That’s because they can’t. Everything livestreaming requires—from constantly filming themselves talking and interacting with viewers to never taking a break even when they’re so sick that they can hardly hear their own voice—can completely destroy both the physical and mental health of these streamers.

The livestreaming industry has expanded vastly from when it was first popularized by YouTube Live in 2008, which now only occasionally hosts live broadcasts for musical performances and Q&As of notable individuals. Today, livestreaming is prevalent all over the world on a multitude of other platforms, with Twitch being one of the most popular, having over 11 million unique streaming channels as of 2022. These livestreaming platforms have opened up to let nearly anyone create and watch the content of their choosing. For the most part, it sounds amazing: you have another way to make money from the comfort of your own home, you can afford most standard equipment needed to begin streaming, and you can have fun playing your favorite video games for an audience.

But, unsurprisingly, it’s not that simple. Though the livestreaming industry can be incredibly profitable and convenient if you’re successful, it also has its dark sides that many naive people unknowingly fall into. If you become a successful streamer, which in itself is already difficult enough, you’ll constantly be subjected to the pressure of having to stream for several hours at a time to maintain viewer engagement and continuously entertain viewers to maintain your popularity and reputation—all eventually leading to burnout. 

Jamie Brausen, a Twitch streamer, explained the harsh reality of the livestreaming industry in 2021, and how it is far more difficult than it looks. Brausen revealed that she had once spent 12 hours recording herself playing a video game and chatting with viewers online. When she woke up the following morning, she found that she had lost her voice and was barely able to move a muscle. Unfortunately, other streamers have also faced similar dilemmas. Due to the tremendous variety of content on streaming platforms and how easy it is to simply sign up and start streaming, competition is immense. As a result, many streamers neglect their health and basic needs by continuing to work when they’re sick, avoiding eating on camera, and limiting trips to the bathroom in order to entertain their audience in fear of losing their engagement. In this day and age, individuals’ attention spans have decreased to such an extent that the average attention span comes to a measly 47 seconds. One sick day off, or even just a quick bathroom break, might result in substantial viewer loss. Even worse, this long-term neglect for their health has detrimental effects, including intense lower back pain, swollen body parts from long hours of inactivity, and strain on their hands and wrists from repetitive motions that can lead to tendinopathy or tiny tears in the tendon.

Similarly, it also means that streamers can’t go on vacation or take breaks, as they know that every minute they’re not streaming or playing, somebody else is, so their views can drop in an instant. Chris Carr, a part-time Twitch streamer, streamed for 12 hours a day on a nonstop schedule of seven days a week. Over time, he began to suffer from detrimental back problems as a result of the excessive weight he put on from the limited activity he performed. Furthermore, since these recordings are live with no room for practice or mistakes that might turn your viewers against you, Carr also suffered from intense bouts of anxiety prior to his streams. 

In addition, these long streams can lead to streamer burnout from both their own content and their viewers. Haelian, a Twitch streamer, spent almost half of his streams playing Hades, a rouge-like game that involves role-playing in high fantasy narratives, turn-based gameplay, and dungeon crawls. Though he was tired of the game himself, his viewers were split between two sides: those who wanted him to continue and those who were also losing interest in it. As Haelian began dedicating his time to various other games, his viewer count dropped until fewer and fewer people were tuning in to any of his content, which started to directly hit his wallet. Unfortunately for streamers, burnout is far from rare when what you play is almost entirely dictated by your audience, and a lot of the time, they might not even be supportive. While fans may cheer a streamer on, they might also cause them stress, harassing the streamer when they do anything that the audience disagrees with or if they move on to different content. In fact, many streamers have suffered from mental health issues such as anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts due to the immense pressure to yield to what their audience wants. For streamers, livestreaming is not only long and tiring but also damaging to bodily and cognitive health.

Furthermore, streamers don’t make as much as one might think. When Twitch’s payment database was leaked in October 2021, it was revealed that the overwhelming majority of Twitch’s broadcasters made less than the U.S. median household income of $67,521. Of the total $889 million Twitch paid out to its streamers, $529 million went to the top one percent, and the remainder went to the bottom lot. Paul Petroskey, a 50-year-old musician in Pittsburgh who had never missed a day of streaming on Twitch, only made $1,200 in an entire month. In addition, fans also have the ability to subscribe to their favorite streamers for a monthly fee, which Twitch receives 30 percent of. In that sense, streamers’ income, similar to most other forms of social media, is based on their popularity, relevance, and how generous their fans are. Anything that makes them unfavorable to their audience, whether it be inconsistent streaming or lack of energy, can cut off their lifeline in mere seconds.

While streaming may sound like a golden opportunity to make money and have fun while doing so, there’s another side of the industry that these dreamers fail to see, which has become a big problem for the people who partake in it. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t things that can be done to improve it. For example, streamers can take snippets of their long live streams and post them on a YouTube channel or another social media platform to earn income on something other than live streams. By doing this, streamers can get payments from a variety of sources, as well as expand their following on different platforms. This way, they can take a day off of live streaming if they need it and just post a pre-recorded video on their social media to attract any new viewers from various websites if their old ones were to leave. Live streaming does have detrimental effects on streamers’ mental and physical health, but that doesn’t mean streaming culture can’t be changed to alleviate these problems.