The Perpetual State of Data

When the Need to Monetize Surpasses the Need to Empathize

Last night, there was a star-studded ex-Twitch staff Twitter Spaces held to talk about the state of Twitch. If you’re being honest with yourself and the things happening, it comes as no surprise that it is very Not Great. With a culmination of bad decisions consistently manifesting as a loss of revenue, then follow up decisions constantly pointing back to ‘make the creators fix it (which is very watered down)’, Twitch finds itself on a very dangerous slippery slope of not having any means to make the revenue they need to keep Daddy Bezos happy. Or stay afloat. Or both?

The conversation by and large was really good…..until it somehow turned into a deluge of….I’ll say ‘passionate’ speaking on how creators can better make money. Because despite a unanimous agreement that it shouldn’t be on the creators to figure out how to make Twitch more money (and in turn it shouldn’t be on creators to make up lost revenue from their C-Suite decisions), this turned on its heel into ‘creators need to diversify their incomes’, backed with a boisterous ‘it’s what all the data says’, followed by ‘I used to believe this too(that it isn’t easy), until I realized people are just too scared to make the switch.’

And this mess, is why

• having cishet white men lead the charge continues to be a nose dive of an effort
• data literacy is critical to conversations where data is bring brought up (which is what I’m focusing on)

The problem I have here, and why I link it to appropriate data literacy, is that too often people who understand data well honestly only understand it a level deep enough to permit them dominance in a conversation.

Trust me. I survived academia and I’m a former data analyst. I had to survive the days of SAS before R was more popular. Data is my thing and I wish it on no one.

The data in reference here was how it is proven that diversifying your income will be more fruitful for you as a creator in the grand scheme of things. I want to make it clear I am not disputing that-it’s a correct assessment. What I’m disputing is the way the data is presented, which is why I say this is a data literacy issue. You see, these data are true and you can make more money diversifying/spreading your content…..if

• you’re not a PoC, which data shows when we try to spread out too much or move from one platform to another most of our communities die.
• you’re not disabled, which data shows has a direct impact on your ability to learn, adapt, adjust, engage multiplicative efforts, or even go live in many cases.
• you’re not neurodivergent. (see above for disabled, same idea)
• you’re not employed full-time elsewhere, meaning a minimum of 40 of your day-to-day hours are gone.
• you’re in a relationship with someone who can help with the income/management. (or in some cases, hold enough of the income that you can focus solely on content creation if you yourself are not the bread winner as a creator)
• you’re in a living situation where you don’t need to worry about utilities heavily and aren’t stressed about making money, likely quickly.

and this list can go on and on with many, heavy, real-life situations that have a direct adverse impact on a person’s capability to spread that income out across multiple platforms. This isn’t me trying to make an uwu claim about needing spoons and/or not trying. To give an idea-I’ll do the thing many frown upon: use myself as an example.

I work full time as a community coordinator at a gaming studio (I’m still withholding where for personal reasons-but I can assure you it isn’t because I work somewhere pedaling crypto or under a CEO that thinks sexual harassment is Fine, Actually). I’m also in a really happy and loving relationship with my boyfriend, Paul. I have to run and manage my current community that gets streams from me 3x a week, 5 hours each. The Wine Cellar Discord has 527 members, which-for all intents and purposes, is small in the sea of Twitch streamers, smedium at best-but I’m still one person. I have a TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube, in supplement to my Twitch channel. I also have KoFi for subs because I frankly don’t want to give Twitch any more money. Initially I didn’t because they have still done a lackluster job addressing bot raids and staunch racism on the platform. Getting out on main and making a really breathy blog about how despite taking 50% of my and thousands of other creators’ incomes, big or small, they still can’t manage their money worth a shit insofar that I need to run ads for them so they can take half of that money too is a choice of choices (and one their community management team gets to deal with the backlash near constantly). People joke about being ‘perpetually online’-but being on Twitter, IG, and writing on Medium has landed me exceptional deals with Astro, Logitech, AverMedia, netted me two college campus paid panels, helped me find management for more deals, get me early access and engagement to games of all sizes, modeling opportunities, and build relationships with some of the chillest and coolest people in the industry. We have to be engaged online. Part of that baseline work to maintain just ONE stream channel for me links to how active I am on Twitter, how often supporters get a #nailCheck on Instagram, how consistently I update my KoFi subs with updates and new shit. I also do game reviews on the side, along with projects for GamesDoneQuick like Juneteenth, UBAF, and one that I am under NDA on.

So on top of all of this, when I say ‘I need better discoverability, at all’-white men leaders say ‘nah, you need to diversify more’-to which my reply by is: where, my kind ser? The only thing left for me really is OnlyFans. No one wants to see my tiddies on the ground making sparks. And most of your homies frown upon that because in 2022 we still can’t unpack why men and their Pick Me counterparts scoff at the idea of a woman being paid for the content she provides (I mean, I know why they don’t like it, but).

But I’m also highlighting all the things I do because someone out there is reading it and already exhausted to shit. Bear in mind amongst all of this I never mentioned my actual lived life. I didn’t mention time with my boyfriend. I didn’t mention time to cook. I didn’t even mention a sleep schedule, or if I do dance or TKD class. I never mentioned panels. Cons. Flying out for gigs. I wrote this article at 12:42am and for all points of this conversation, this is also my content. I could be sleep. I’m instead up writing. Some days? A nap wins. Being told ‘that means you aren’t trying’-bluntly?

Bitch, I am tired.

Everything written above is the conversation that these Data Experts™ love to pretend doesn’t exist. Or maybe they actually don’t know. I doubt it, but I won’t exclude the possibility. Data like these-things that point to the fact that you objectively will make more money if you expand beyond Twitch, which again, I don’t disagree with-have a tendency to be presented as an absolute and not an answer to a question. These data paint A story, not THE story. Oftentimes, when I see convos around data at all, it’s purposely (or maybe not) misconstrued to push a narrative that isn’t 100% true.

I had a convo with former Twitch staff at one point about ads and how their slides were horrible smokescreens. They presented something like data that said ‘users who ran ads for this program saw a 15% increase of revenue’ and used it as a justification point for people to run ads. The data wasn’t lying, but the person who wrote it was absolutely equivocating.

Because it can be true that all users saw a 15% increase in revenue, and it can be also true that that 15% increase was a pretty insignificant amount for the majority. Someone making $2,000/mo saw an extra $300. I can absolutely use another $300! That’s a wholly different discussion for the person who made $200 and sees a bonus $30. It’s an even harder sell when the person making $85….still can’t make the threshold for a payout-which is much more representative of the population speaking up. These data also actively ignored the overwhelming swath of people who were vocal about ads killing their viewership. It was countered with ‘the data says viewers don’t mind ads’-but the data we saw in front of us-thousands of people mass tagging and criticizing Twitch-said very otherwise. Hell, every time Twitch pushes anything with ads it’s met with massive backlash. But that gets hand-waved away, because ‘those are just Twitter users, we’re using hard data’-as though companies don’t have entire departments dedicated to understanding user experience and feedback via their reactions and engageemet-which by the way, are also data.

I don’t know bout yall, but I’m not keen on getting ratioed every time I make a decision that my community seems to dislike. I wouldn’t last at Twitch, because I would just blurt out eventually ‘don’t the data we have and the data we see conflict?’

The most damning detail, however, is how many different ad programs they have tried to run that, allegedly, per the data, ‘are good for creators and even better long term’ that either stop being pushed or just quietly fade out.

This is why we need better data literacy.
Looking at numbers, then reciting that ‘numbers go brrr’ makes you look smart to people who don’t have the tools on deck to read data.
But as a collective: we need to understand data better.
We need to be able to look at data presented and do a deeper dive to recognize and acknowledge why and how pushback happens.
That data again: tells A story, but not THE ABSOLUTE story. Depending on the data, it can be catered to a specific story you want to push (and often is, which is why two white men are specifically uninterested in compounding their data about the best ways to monetize cross-platform with the data of who is most frequently doing such, leaving platforms successfully, or who is consistently speaking out against Twitch).

You’re right: statistically, it is better to expand your content.
But if you’re unwilling to acknowledge why statistically, more people ‘don’t just do that’, or to even take the time to analyze who statistically has the means to diversify cleanly, then you are unfit to talk on the topic. I see creators on the daily spreading themselves thinner than mayonnaise on stale toast trying to saturate every market and then a few months later, making Twitter threads about platform racism, platform sexism, their posts being targeted, their posts being taken down-all of that shit needs to be considered with the data presented. Eventually: they stop posting some places, or they burn out.

These data are linked, my dudes.
If you’re not willing to acknowledge that, bow out.

Trying to put it under a light of ‘you just aren’t trying enough’, ‘you need to stop being afraid of risks’, or ‘but the data says it’s better so just do it’ grossly misrepresents other stories of the data and also highlights that your interest isn’t in the data so much as it’s in being right at this precise moment.

We see this even with Democrats getting pissy about voting: ‘statistically, X amount of people supporting these policies don’t vote-ergo it must be because they don’t care.’ This is why we tirelessly talk about things like red lining, gerrymandering, voter suppression. If your claim is going to be ‘the data says not enough people are voting’, and you want that to be taken seriously? You need to also be willing to investigate why people aren’t voting. That data will show you the people most likely to not vote because they have access and don’t want to are white. Those same data will also help you navigate to the Black, brown, Hispanic, or otherwise PoC populations who say ‘I want to vote, but the closest location for me is an hour bus ride away and they close by the time I’m off’ or ‘I want to vote, but the job I hold won’t give me time off’, or ‘I want to vote, but the closest location is 25 miles away and I can’t afford an Uber.’ These data are just as valuable to the original data pool being cited, and I’d argue even more valuable because these secondary data help towards resolution building.

But I feel that is the biggest reason data literacy is as poor as it is.
Because if people fully understood the gravity and impact of an issue, they would see and realize they have to do more than just recite some pretty surface level numbers.
They’d have to go deeper and ask things like ‘who did you poll for this? what is the demographic data? do you have anything more granular?’ and be met overwhelmingly with ‘no’ or hand-wringing (I saw this often in my grad program). But then?

They’d have to get off their asses and do something, with their big money, their big followage, and their big platform.
And truly, who can expect people who have access to those resources to just do that?

The last line is heavy sarcasm.
Because especially in Western culture: one of our biggest motivators is the desire to be right. Doesn’t matter the harm we inflict, so long as we are right, technically.
And is why I’m willing to entertain, as a data analyst of what I hope is integrity, that perhaps I don’t have all the details.
Because I am leaving space to assume that perhaps all of these things haven’t been considered.
But as a Black, asexual demigirl, I have some pretty strong confidence that they were considered and subsequently, disregarded.

Alas: I don’t have the concrete, actualized data to assume nor back that.
So unlike my white counterparts, I struggle to assume I am an authority on a topic while the data, to some extent, is lacking.
Lacking….?
No. Let me rephrase.

Unlike my cishet abled white counterparts, I struggle to pretend I am an authority on a topic while the data I recite is essentially, incomplete.
Not because they cannot access the data (which happens sometimes!) —
but because they have no interest in actually engaging it.

Data literacy is important because it is much easier, and more dangerous, to take surface level data and run with it as an authority….

Than it is to intimately interact with, and understand the data, and use it to it’s fullest potential.

A potential that is often skipped, first because energy would be required (which is ironic, given in this topic and many others the proposed solution is ‘just put in more energy’), and second, money is often on the table (and many of these people don’t want to plainly say they aren’t letting go of money).

Who really wants to theorycraft their way out of more potential money when surviving a capitalist hellscape?

That’s far too much like tying to do the right thing.
And wait a minute: I said people wanted to just be right.
I never said they wanted to do right.