So you just got invited to be a Twitch Affiliate? Congrats!! Here's some handy information that you might want to browse through. No rush, so just bookmark this page and come back to it when you're ready.
Yes, it's great to think "hey now I can get paid to play games / create art / etc", but don't get too excited for this side of things. Subscription money is shared with Twitch, there are tax withholdings, you won't get paid till you hit 100 USD, and even then there's a month or two of delay. So just keep on doing what you're passionate about, keep on engaging with your community, and when your first payout arrives, it'll be a cool bonus.
Same goes for viewership numbers, follower counts, and all those other juicy stats. Don't stress about them. Maybe you won't have three average viewers. Maybe you will. Maybe someone will raid you, and you'll have heaps of people! That's great! But maybe not, too, and that's okay. Make your streams the best they can be, and don't worry about whether the numbers are going up or down.
Okay, that's the negativity out of the way. On to the more fun stuff!!
Exciting, but perhaps daunting in their massive flexibility. You have three slots waiting to be filled with iconographic representations of you and your community. Unless you are yourself an emote artist, spend some time looking at the portfolios of a few artists available for commission.
- Lara_Cr
- MaayaInsane
- Videokid
- KisakaToriama
- And any other emote artists you know of
In general, simple shapes communicate better than scaled-down photographs do. You can't see much detail at 56x56 pixels or below (which is how emotes are usually seen in Twitch chat), so the bolder and simpler the lines, the more likely that the emote will say what it's trying to say.
(If you're a highly competent artist (or tightly strapped for cash), you can always create your own emotes, but it's often still worth browsing portfolios, just for the sake of seeing what people do.)
As an affiliate, you start with one emote slot at each tier. What should you put in them?
- Tier 1 is the base emote. Everyone who subscribes to your channel gets this emote, so it should be the most iconic representation of your channel. What makes your channel different from every other one? What is something that you focus on? Think about how your emote will be used in OTHER people's channels.
- Tier 2 is for people who double-sub to you. For twice the price of a tier 1 emote, someone can have two emotes. Only a handful of people will sub at this tier, so you can use this slot for something that's less iconic or less channel specific.
- Tier 3 is reserved for those wonderful and rare individuals who are willing to pay FIVE TIMES the normal subscription price. Which might not be anyone at all - but it's still available to you, the streamer. Your tier three emote can be anything that you really just WISH existed, or perhaps it can celebrate the generosity of those who want to support you so much.
- When people cheer in your channel, they can permanently unlock emotes. If you have slots for these emotes, again, you'll have those emotes yourself.
- Remember, affiliation doesn't stop you from using BTTV or FFZ emotes within your own channel. Plan for your subscriber emotes to be used in other parts of Twitch, and for emotes that would only ever be used in your own chat, use one of the free services.
Uploading new emotes introduces a small delay while they're approved, but you can redo this any time you want to. So don't stress out over this, and have all the fun :)
As your channel grows, you have the opportunity to unlock more Tier 1 emotes, and emotes for the higher bit badges too. So if you have more ideas for emotes than you have slots for, write down the other ideas, as you might be able to use them later!
Since you've already reached the point of affiliation, you most likely have on-stream alerts for new followers, hosts, etc, perhaps via StreamLabs or some similar service. Now you have more events to look at alerts for - cheers, subs, resubs, gift subs, etc. As with emotes, these can strongly contribute to your channel's theme. Most likely, this won't be at all surprising to you.
Again, you almost certainly have some useful panels below your stream. Time to add a few more! Showcase your emotes, perhaps. Do you have your schedule there (or, even better, a link to a Google calendar)? Talk about the benefits your subscribers get or what you do for your subscribers. Commemorate your strongest supporters. Doesn't have to be much, but this is a good time to browse your current panels and see what you can add.
If you don't have one, now's a good time to get one. There are a variety of bots available - famous ones like Nightbot and Moobot, popular instantiable bots like StreamLabs Chatbot (formerly Ankhbot) and DeepBot, and a variety of others (eg StilleBot, maintained by Rosuav and operating under his name, can also be run in your own instance).
Once you have sub emotes, you can create bot commands that make use of them!
Unlocking VIP badges for the channel requires having five chatters at once, so you may or may not have this feature. But when you do, you'll be able to reward the people who've loyally supported your stream. Find yourself one or more good mods and then give VIP badges to some other amazing people. Again, this isn't specifically related to affiliation, but as your channel grows, you have a perfect opportunity to think about this again.
Keep your channel going strong by doing the same things that got you to this point: loving what you do, streaming consistently, having something that people want to watch, networking with other streamers. None of that changes, but now you can use affiliate perks (mainly emotes) to strengthen what you do.
So keep on having all the fun! Stream on. Keep on being awesome.