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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

It really is a buyer’s market in the attention economy. Viewers are fickle and it’s easy to jump ship if your preferred personality goes in a different direction.

Same goes for TV and video games. There’s just so much stuff being made constantly. It’s trivial for viewers/players to switch to something else.

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Yeah, plus you have to contend with power laws. Most sales or attention is concentrated in the top ~10 and then drops off rapidly with a long skinny tail. You see this with the top selling books, apps, movies, games and things like Twitter followers as well.

Twitch viewership[1] is a realtime example showing this kind of distribution. The top handful always dominate.

1. https://www.twitch.tv/directory

Twitch is an extremely imbalanced platform in regard to discoverability. Their model is to 'make the big bigger' and monetize a narrow field of creators well, rather than monetize a larger pool of creators. There are a number of valid criticisms of the platform, but this one is the most painful for new creators to contend with by a wide margin.

It also sucks for advertisers looking to work directly with those creators because it narrows the field of creators large enough to work with. Plus it inflates their viewership with users that may be less suitable for targeting.

It’s a specialist’s market. Want to sell an FPS? Good luck getting noticed. Want to make games that only cater to chess players who are also into LISP programming? With a bit of work you can totally carve a niche for yourself.

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