Hi,
I've talked with Experts about this idea and I'm so excited to see if/how/when it gets implemented!
So before I go into specifics who here has a website associated with their stream and if so how do you use your website in tandem with your stream in terms of audience retention/engagement?
Our stream is Couch Talk with Gamer Girls and we use the website (
www.couchtalkwithgamergirls.com) as a means to give viewers more to do after the stream that is fun. eg use points earned from bets and watching stream to bid or buy things in the website shop and also play games with goal of winning high scores for earning more points and bragging rights.
Okay so here's the idea.
The bot stores your data from the stream (eg usernames, points balance per player, hours watched etc) locally (at this point). Now if an output function was implemented using a template format for maybe a CSV file we could upload data into the stream after broadcast.
Eg CSV data per line: username, points, hours watched, sub or no sub, etc etc
and before a broadcast (I could hire a developer to make this type of plugin for us) we will output the same format from our website (lock the website points system until stream is over) and place that file in the bot directory and the bot would implement the changes to the point balance per player.
Now here's where we take these ideas to the next level (I haven't talked to experts about these yet):
There could be an additional column of data added to each viewer in this template to show if they are a verified website user or not.. if they are then special raffles can be done for just website users. Why do this? This would give incentive to have many of your viewers (on the fence of deciding to sign up on your website) to actually sign up on your website so they can participate in the special raffles and contests. Now wouldn't that be awesome?
Here's another idea.. as a website owner, if you approach companies or are approached by companies for advertising opportunities, your impressions and access to viewer data means EVERYTHING. What I learned from VidCon2013 in Anaheim California is that for content creators like us, a newsletter is incredibly important. And the larger your user database in your newsletter (either mailchimp or whatever, eg MyMail wordpress plugin) the greater value your brand has in potential reach since you have a means to directly contact your viewers (since YouTube doesn't share your subscriber emails with you... yet). Anyways long story short... if you had a newsletter, there could be another column in the bot's user data template to check if user is subscribed to your newsletter or not and you could do custom raffles just for newsletter subscribers (if experts allowed) which would give incentive more so to signup for your newsletter.
The overall idea of ALL of this is to maximize your monetizing potential while giving your fans more than the average joe stream in terms of pure fun and awesomeness! And in order to maximize your monetizing potential (since we live in a free world where you can't really make people do things.. we're not robots) you need to come up with powerful incentives to get the desired responses / actions from your audience so it's a WIN WIN for all parties. Basic economics.
Okay.. here's even a bigger (and more expensive in terms of 3rd party development) idea that would be even higher levels of awesomeness! Instead of my previous idea of integration where you manually stop your website point system... if the plugin that's made has an API... Experts BOT (better named as the world's best twitch.tv semi-automated chat assistant) could directly connect to your website from the computer you're using to run his chat assistant to allow nearly no interruption to user activity on your website which would allow them to still earn/spend points via the website when you're live. Why do this? let's say a viewer is desperate to join a raffle but doesn't have enough points.. the user could immediately go to your website and donate / buy points which would then automatically update to Expert's chat assistant at whatever set interval you have updates set to. This would revolutionize the way content creators use twitch.tv and save up a lot of manual work time which could then be used to focus on providing your viewers an even greater experience.
This is all VERY possible... and can be an incentive for Experts to implement for a subscription if streamers catch on to my proposal.
My proposal can be done rather easily for developing the website plugin if:
#1 You have a private wordpress website (not a wordpress.com one but an actually fully installed one on your own host)
#2 You are using MyCred as your point system on your wordpress website
#3 You are using a newsletter plugin like MyMail
If we all use these 3 factors... I can easily get a special addon made for MyCred that works with Expert's chat assistant through an API. And for security the addon can have an IP address lock to only allow your streaming computer to connect to the addon incase someone managed to get your API code.
Expert's, let me know what you think. I'll help fund as much as I can depending on how much I'm able to raise to fund this.
Everyone, please feel free to contact me and/or please feel encouraged to reply with your ideas as well on this overall topic.
Kind Regards to all twitch.tv users,
David AE Levy
-producer of Couch Talk with Gamer Girls
P.S. please forgive the slightly pretentious subject title I gave this topic.
