RoyalsRoyale Post-Mortem

5 min readSep 30, 2020

What was StreamRatings

StreamRatings was meant to be a resource for viewers to discover quality streams, and for quality streams to be discovered. In addition, it was my intention to give quality feedback and constructive criticism to streamers… what was working and what could be improved on.

My thought was, that highly-rated small streamers would want to promote the fact that they were being noticed, and that they had gotten a high-rating… promoting themselves (and StreamRatings) by re-tweeting their rating announcement tweet.

The reality was that I (StreamRatings) was a nobody, no one knew who I was (or cared), I had no gravitas. So, when I rated a stream, (in the majority of cases) the streamer just didn’t care. And if the stream got a mediocre score, the streamer obviously wouldn’t want to promote that fact. Low and mid-scoring streamers also weren’t interested in having their show critiqued. -Which I understand to a certain degree. Although, I do feel as though anyone wanting to improve should at least be open to, if not curious about, criticisms.
Even high-scoring streamers almost never re-tweeted/shared or commented on their rating announcement post. With only a few ‘liking’ the post. There were a few exceptions, though… but not many.

How I got the idea for RoyalsRoyale

In my first batch of ratings (June 2020), popular streamer Moonmoon was randomly selected to be rated. So, I observed his show and gave him a rating like any other streamer… When I tweeted out his rating, I saw a huge spike in my Twitter and site views. Moonmoon and his community seemed a bit ‘tickled’ by the idea-Commenting, liking, and re-tweeting. They were all nice about the whole thing — I had feared that a Twitch Royal (top streamer) or their community would take exception to being ‘judged’ (understandable), this didn’t happen with Moonmoon.
After the Moonmoon excitement ended, my view numbers went back down to near nothing. I continued on normally through July and August.
In August, I knew I needed a way to get more views. — I came up with a few novelty schemes (5 star rated streamers tournament, a women only month, etc….). And then I came up with the RoyalsRoyale.

Prep

I spent all of August (2020) coming up with and prepping the tournament (slated to go live in September), I opted for a series of boxing matches. I created a number of video game ‘player select’ screens, loosely based on the Mortal Kombat 2 player select screen.

Also, I created a number of pictures depicting the winning blow of the match, or the referee raising the hand of the winner of the bout.

Along with various other useful pictures.

I wrote and scheduled a series of tweets/posts announcing the bouts and their winners, intermixed with promotion of the previous high-ranking small streamers. I say ‘wrote’, but really, I wrote and then re-wrote these posts a number of times. I did my best to make these posts as entertaining as possible, framing them as boxing match announcements and post-match exclamations.
Not only was I posting on Twitter, I also started a Facebook page and a Linkedin account. I forgot about Instagram for a while, but eventually began posting there, too.

Exp 1.

Exp 2.

Show time!

How I thought it would go-

I really, truly, believed that there was no way that RoyalsRoyale would fail. I just couldn’t see how it could.
How could I be consistently tweeting/posting, about these top-level Twitch Royals and not be seen? How could these Royals’ communities not be excited to see their favorite streamer(s) battle it out? The spirit of competition alone would drive this project forward, dragging not only StreamRatings, but all the previously rated small streamers, along for the ride!

It works like this-

I tweet/post that Royal1 will ‘fight’ Royal2
The Royals’ community sees the post
They re-tweet
The Royals see this thing spread and get excited
The involved Royals talk about it on stream
Uninvolved Royals and non-Royals jump on the bandwagon
A snow-ball effect happens
???
profit

How it actually went-

Almost no one saw my posts, and %99 of those that did, didn’t care. RoyalsRoyale went absolutely no-where.
Note: Many of the re-tweets/likes/etc… were from my alt-accounts.

What (I think) went wrong

I can only guess, but I would think that my failure comes down to one of (or a combination of) two factors: 1. Social media algorithms, or 2. Top streamers may be too popular.

Social Media algorithms are set to promote the already popular, and suppress the less or unpopular. All in an effort to show the people what the algorithm thinks will appeal to them… Unfortunately, this makes it difficult for those at the bottom to become popular, or to even been seen by the masses that may actually be interested in the content. The ‘AI’ involved isn’t sophisticated enough to actually ‘know’ what a post’s content is. And apparently, adding proper hashtags, links, and pictures isn’t enough to inform the AI as to who would actually want to see the post.

The second possibility is that popular streamers may be too popular. With so many people @mentioning them it’s easy to lost in the crowd. I would have thought that the tens-of-thousands of followers of these top streamers would have seen my posts and spread them. My mistake.

OR
Maybe the problem was that my content isn’t what people are interested in (aka- shit content)… that’s possible.

Where I go from here…

Since StreamRatings is a bust, I’ve decided that ratings and tournaments are useless without the gravitas to back them up. I’ve morphed StreamRatings into StreamSpotlyte, where I will search out and promote high-quality, interesting, or fun small streamers.
It’s my hope that I can draw attention to streamers that may not otherwise get view numbers that reflect the time/energy/thoughtfulness that they put into their show, while at the same time, forego the time and effort wasted on rating low and mid-quality streams -Streams that wouldn’t promote the fact that they got a par (or sub-par) rating anyway.

We’ll see what happens over the next few months…

For the three people that read this, Thanks for reading,

Terabull (StreamSpotlyte)

Linktree

#Twitch #RoyalsRoyale #Twitchtv #TwitchStreamers #SupportSmallStreamers

Originally published at http://streamspotlyte.com on September 30, 2020.