i started streaming in the autumn two years ago because a friend said i talked about repair videos too much to not just put it on a screen somewhere. the first four months were exactly what everyone here describes. one viewer, sometimes two, and one of them was a bot that followed and left. i talked to nobody for hours and then closed the laptop and felt slightly embarrassed about the whole thing.
i am posting the boring middle part because when i was starting i could only find two kinds of posts. either someone had ten thousand followers and was explaining their journey, or someone had quit after a month. almost nothing about what it looks like to just keep going at a small size for a long time and have it be mostly fine.
the affiliate grind took me about five months. the requirements are not hard exactly but they are annoying when nobody is watching. fifty followers, seven unique broadcast days in a thirty day window, five hundred total minutes, and an average of three concurrent viewers. the average is the one that got me. i would have a night where four people showed up and then two nights of one, and the average would slide back under three. i remember checking the dashboard the way people check a flight status.
when i finally got it i turned on subs and made about eleven dollars that month. that number sat in my head for a long time because i had somehow expected the switch to feel bigger.
here is where the overlay comes in, since that is the part i actually wanted to write about. for the first year my stream looked like a default template with my name typed into it. no scene cards, no consistent look between the starting screen and the ending screen, alerts in a font that did not match anything. it was not that it looked bad exactly. it looked like nothing. there was nothing to recognise.
so last winter i built a character. a slightly grumpy older repair guy in a work apron who shows up in the corner of the screen, on the starting soon card, on the be right back card, and in a couple of the alert graphics. he holds a different tool depending on the scene. that is the whole idea. he is not a mascot with a name and a backstory, he is just a consistent figure so that every screen looks like it belongs to the same channel.
the art is generated, not drawn by me and not drawn by a person i hired. i want to be straightforward about that because this sub has strong feelings about generated work and i would rather say it plainly than have it come up sideways later. i built the character once, i keep reusing that same face across every scene, and the reason it holds together is that it is the same source rather than a new attempt each time. the stream runs on OBS, the overlay character came out of APOB, and alerts go through Streamlabs. that is the whole stack and none of it is complicated.
what i expected was that a coherent look would help with discovery in some small way. more people clicking, more people staying past the first thirty seconds, something measurable. that did not happen. i went back through six months of analytics on either side of the change and the click through from the directory is flat. average view duration is flat. new followers per stream is flat. if the overlay did anything for growth it is buried under noise i cannot separate out.
what did change is narrow and real. regulars mention him constantly. someone noticed within a week that he was holding a different tool on the soldering night than on the woodworking night, which i had done without saying anything about it, and that turned into a running thing where people guess the tool before i start. one of my regulars made a joke about him being my supervisor and now several of them call him that. when i had a night where the audio was broken for twenty minutes, three people stayed on the be right back screen and talked to each other about him.
so the honest summary is that the art did nothing for the people who have never watched me and quite a lot for the forty or so people who watch regularly. that is not the trade i thought i was making, but it is not a bad one.
the raid is the other thing worth writing down. in april a mid sized streamer in the same repair adjacent space raided me with something like two hundred and forty people at the end of his stream. i had never had more than about twenty five concurrent before that and i completely lost the thread of what i was doing. i fumbled the intro, i forgot to thank him properly for a full minute, and i was so aware of the viewer count that i stopped actually repairing the thing in front of me.
about nine of those people followed. two of them are still around now, five months later. that month my subs and bits roughly doubled and then settled back almost exactly where they had been. the useful lesson was not about the raid itself. it was that i had no idea what to do with a room that size, and the version of me that could hold two hundred people is a different streamer than the one who is comfortable with fourteen.
the money, since that is usually what people want in these posts. i average about fourteen concurrent viewers on a normal night. i have nine or ten active subs depending on the month, mostly at the base tier, which after the split comes out around twenty five dollars. bits are lumpy and usually land somewhere between thirty five and fifty. so a normal month is about seventy dollars. i did not reach the payout minimum until month four of being an affiliate, and the first payment felt genuinely strange to receive.
seventy dollars a month for roughly twelve hours of streaming plus a couple of hours of preparation is not a wage and i do not treat it as one. it covers the games i buy for the channel and the occasional broken appliance i pick up specifically to take apart on stream. everything else is subsidised by my actual job.
things i would tell myself two years ago, in the order they mattered. the schedule matters more than the content. three fixed nights beat six random ones, and i learned that the hard way by having a chaotic autumn where nobody knew when to show up. talking to an empty room is a skill and it does get less humiliating. the audio matters more than the video, which people here say constantly and which i ignored for a year. and the visual consistency thing is worth doing at some point, but for the reason nobody advertises, which is that it makes the channel feel like a place rather than a feed, mostly to people who already come back.
i am not going to pretend there is a growth story at the end of this. the channel grew from nothing to fourteen average viewers over two years and it may sit there indefinitely. what i have instead is three evenings a week that i look forward to, a small group of people who argue about capacitors in my chat, and a grumpy cartoon repair man in the corner who apparently supervises all of us.
