Hello and welcome to Let's Chat. Let's Chat is a live podcast where I talk with creators about live streaming and the ways that streamers and their communities shape culture. Yesterday, today, and in the future. So I'm Dan Clancy, I'm the CEO of Twitch, and I'm happy to speak to the Austin Show or Austin, however we want to describe him.
I'm doing well, Austin. And for those who don't know, Austin and I know each other well. So this should be a fun chat.
Oh, yeah. Easy. Easy peasy. We know each other very well, going back. And he really hates me. He really hates me. Number one enemy. Yeah, I tell you, big time. Dan and I rarely get along. We really do.
No, we'll have. You know, we're already planning a lava ladder match. One of these years.
That's right. That's absolutely right. I'm digging the hat there, Dan.
All right. Well, yeah, I went back and forth whether I wanted to wear it for the podcast, and I realize it's kind of become iconic, so I should wear it on the podcast.
Absolutely. It's your thing, so you should embrace it as you have.
Yep, yep. All right, and so let's jump in here. And for those that are listening, we're going to keep a little bit of an eye on chat, and we may sprinkle in some questions from chat while we're going. And I won't be calling out who it is in chat, but I'll say chat's got a question, so you can feel free to put it in. We're going to record the podcast, and then at the end we're going to have a little bit of time after we're not recording the podcast where we may look at chat a little bit more. So if you have any detailed things, you may save it till then. So before we get into you as a streamer, tell me a little bit more about you growing up, and in particular those aspects that you think were kind of foundational in leading this to be your chosen career.
Well, first of all, thank you, Dan, for having me. I feel like a presidential candidate, like I'm here, I'm running for office. No. Well, hello, everybody. If you don't know me, my name is Austin Show. I've been streaming on Twitch since 2013. I have done a lot of things on the platform that I'm very proud of. And yeah, where I grew up, I was born and raised in Oregon, beautiful Pacific Northwest, and from a young age I had a really strong interest in entertainment across the board. I grew up watching a lot of reality TV shows, American Idol, America's Got Talent. I used to even host my own little talent shows in grade school. I would bring people together and then do little talent shows during recess. I would do the same thing in my neighborhood, and I always had a passion for being on stage, even as a young boy, and had a desire to be in front of the camera in some capacity. Sometimes it manifested as wanting to be a professional singer because my mom is a professional singer. So I was like, I want to sing, I want to do music. Obviously, you know, it's not my strongest thing or really where my passion is. But yeah, you know, I grew up.
Do you remember the first time you were on stage, not just like in second grade, but do you remember anything that jumps out in terms of your memory? Not necessarily the first time, but tell me one story about a particular thing you did that jumps to mind.
Like as a young child or just like in...
Either as a child or in high school. No, no, no, as a child. Before you started streaming, that's like, you know, in other words, anything that jumps out at you.
Well, I remember the first time I was on stage was I was in a play in second grade, and we sang. I don't know what the song is, but it's 525,600 from the song from Rent. So I don't know what the play was. Maybe it was Rent, but I played a jock in the play, and that was one of the first moments that I remember really being on stage and performing. Another time that sticks out is getting the opportunity to just speak in front of a classroom. I remember eighth grade, we all got the opportunity to speak up in front of the entire class, and I gave a speech and made everybody laugh with what I was saying. And so those are some of my earliest memories of being on a stage in some capacity.
Yeah, I just have this image of a young Austin performing, and it just seems like your parents probably have lots of good videos.
Oh, yeah. Somewhere. I was a terrible actor, though, Dan. As a terrible actor, I didn't get the lead role in the play, and I was extremely jealous of my friend who got one of the leads. But he didn't end up in entertainment at all, so clearly the producers missed it.
There. Missed it. So now get us to when you started streaming, and like, how old were you and what were you doing when this streaming thing...
Well, I heard about streaming. I don't know how I heard about it. I don't remember how I heard about Twitch, to be honest with you. But I started streaming in 2013, right when Twitch was really in its infancy and sort of the wild west of the platform. And I heard about this Twitch thing. Where I was at in life, I was an 18-year-old, I had just graduated from high school, I was going into college, and I started streaming from my laptop in my dorm room at the college that I attended. And yeah, very early days. Twitch looks a lot different than it does now. But yeah, that's how it started. I was streaming in my dorm room from freshman year and then into my sophomore year, and it truly started out as a hobby because when I started, Twitch wasn't a career. It wasn't a career at all. This was not something that you would just start up and, oh my God, this could be my job. So I always looked at it as a hobby, and I made some pretty decent money. I remember I had made, I think, $6,000 from Twitch, and I remember thinking, man, if I walk away from this right now, man, I felt rich, you know what I mean? I was like, wow, what a success, because I didn't expect to really make anything.
And did you finish college or did you decide... no, you finished college, and then when you finished, that's when you started. Because in addition to Twitch, you do a lot of hosting in general for esports and other things. So when did you... and you're kind of unique in that. I find you unique in that, you know, you're someone who's been around Twitch since the early days, but you've always been kind of innovating beyond sitting in a bedroom playing a game.
Yes, yes. And from the moment I kind of entered Twitch, I was always perplexed by the fact that everybody enjoyed... and this is no, I don't want to just put down gaming, I enjoy gaming, I came up on gaming. I played gaming as a kid. Old school RuneScape, Madden, Halo, Call of Duty. I played a lot of gaming, but for me personally, I was always perplexed by why people on Twitch weren't doing non-gaming content because I found reality TV and non-gaming content to be wildly more entertaining than sitting and watching somebody play a video game. No offense, but for me personally, that's how I always felt. And so I always challenged that part of the platform from the very beginning. In fact, getting banned because I wasn't adequately playing enough games. For those of you that are here, you may not know, but there was a time on Twitch where it was actually a bannable offense not to play a video game. This was early, early days.
And Austin, I am sure, would have gotten banned a bunch.
Yeah. So yeah, way back when. Yeah, for sure. Certainly did. But yeah, my philosophy has always been, from the moment I entered the platform, to push. I've always wanted to create things that were different than what everybody else is doing, for sure.
Now, the thing that is interesting about you, of course, one thing is it's not just gaming, but the other thing is you've always leaned into exploring more shows, having a little more production value as you think about it. So why don't you tell us the story? What was your first show that you think of, of the various ones you've done that gained notoriety, in other words, not your first one that nobody cared about. I want your first one that anyone cared about.
Well, the first show that anybody gave a about is, I think, was a show called King of the Hill. And so it started in like the dating realm, right? I would put four judges on the screen, male or female. King of the Hill was like four female judges. Queen of the Hill was four male judges. And we would bring on people. I was obsessed and still obsessed with the idea of bringing people in from the audience and bringing them onto the screen. I think that's such a fish out of water. You also get to meet and get introduced to new aspiring streamers and stuff like that, and I was obsessed with that from the beginning. So we created a lot of our content early on, was driven by this idea that we're going to pull somebody from the audience and put them in a fish out of water situation. So dating is something that I've always found extremely interesting. It's extremely entertaining. It's widely relatable. So we created this format called King of the Hill, where basically you would come on, try to impress the judges based on your dateability, and if you were good enough, you'd hold the hill and you would be competing against... we would cycle through people and as the people came through, just like a schoolyard game.
Like just like a schoolyard game. Yes, exactly. You have to stay on top, right? Exactly.
You have to stay on top. We did that.
And by the way, the criteria was how dateable is this person?
Yeah, more or less. I mean, you know, the lines were blurred sometimes. We had judges that were not in relationships or single or whatever that wanted to engage in sort of dating content themselves. And so the lines were blurred in that respect. But that caught on quite quickly, I'd say, and really was one of the defining shows, I would say, that sort of catapulted me into a more mainstream conversation on the platform. But that led into Lover Host, and Lover Host became a massive, massive show on Twitch that exploded through COVID. And still, I believe it maintains relevancy. And when collaborating with people, the formula still works incredibly well.
Well, and so go through the Lover Host formula for those folks that have not.
So for those of you that don't know what Lover Host is, Lover Host is a dating show where we take a main contestant, typically like a streamer of some sort, and then we pair them up with ten people that are vying for their love. The key here is that not all the contestants on the show are there for love. Some of them are there for host. Host used to be... I was actually really upset when they took away host, because it kind of made the brand name, you know.
Lover Host. Now nobody knows what's relevant.
We need to bring it back just so that your brand is that people understand it.
I kept the brand, though, because I really don't think that the name of host really meant anything. But really, host means betrayal, right? And the idea of the show is that you could either come on and choose lover or host. Love meaning you're interested in the person, and host meaning, well, I want all the viewers that come at the end of the show. So if you end up winning and you chose host, well, then you get hosted with all of the viewers from the show, right? And if it's love, then you match and it's happily ever after. So there's this multi-depth part of the show where it's like you have the person who's playing the contestants on the screen are nervous, right? Because they don't want to be eliminated. And then the main person is nervous because they're trying to determine who's choosing love and who's choosing host. And even in instances where we had Sykkuno on as one of the main guests one time, he got eleven. We sometimes we put eleven people on. Eleven people chose love. But even throughout that, there's still always the idea that somebody could choose host even up until the end.
Okay, so were there any relationships that came out of Lover Host?
Yes. Actually, yes. So like I can't... I'm not sure if there are any longer... I don't want to speak on them publicly, but there are.
People that... you don't need to give any examples. You don't need to. You don't know of any marriages?
No, I don't know any marriages. But I think we're in line with the success of other reality TV shows when it comes to that.
Yeah. You're right up there with The Bachelor.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly, exactly.
So now, one thing I know that you always are passionate about and you really thought a lot about early on, because you and I talked about it once, is being a connector. And so talk a little bit about how you thought of your role of introducing streamers and helping people find an audience. And who are some of the folks that, as you were building a property, that it became a good platform for them to broaden their audience and get people more aware of what they were doing.
Yeah. I mean, I think one of the cool things about the shows that I put on were that they had a lot of viewers. And so we would bring on people and I feel like we had a unique ability to identify people that were really entertaining, because that was our goal, to entertain. And then these people would get on and then they'd build platforms for themselves. And some of them went on to get millions and millions of followers. I have a hard time taking credit for those people and really mentioning, being like, oh, it's because...
You didn't make them, because the beauty of it is, right, the reality is it's always a bunch of things.
Yeah. Like, but you know, a couple of examples, like Cinderella had early spots on my stream. You know, even Hasan Piker had early spots on my stream. This is before... but I didn't make any of these people. They went on to have very successful careers of their own. But you know, I feel like a lot of people... I saw myself as somebody who I wanted to collaborate, and I still want to collaborate with a lot of different communities and sort of be the bridge between them. You know, I think there's a lot of different communities on Twitch, and having the opportunity to put on shows where I'm mixing and matching these audiences together in ways that they never would be together before, has been something that I've always prided myself in, and something that I hope to have the opportunity to continue to do for a very long time.
All right. Great. So a question that chat asked, okay, is did you promote your show on social or was it just popular naturally?
So it's so interesting that you said that. I think that you need a combination of both. And you know, with the Elon acquisition of X or Twitter, it has really, really put a wrench in my marketing strategy for my content and overall platform. Twitter used to be a place where you used to be able to send out a notification, and it would reach your followers. Now it gets put into an algorithm. So it's almost like a lot of my ability to market my shows has been diminished and almost become like luck. It's like luck that people are going to see it or engage with it. And it's not reaching the people that I know are going to click on a Twitch link, right? The people that follow me, those people are going to watch on Twitch. If it just goes out in the ether to random people, they may not even click it. So to answer their question, yes, I did a combination of those things, but also my marketing strategy had to do with, like, I would tweet out, I'd put it on all my socials. I'd come up with a banner, that banner would get engaged with by a bunch of people. And then I would also talk with the creator that was coming on the show. I would appear on their stream, I would talk about the show, I would get hype, I would leak guests, I would start buzz around the show and I would do it myself and with social media. But at a certain point, you need the audience to buy into it to start generating that buzz exponentially. You need like a product that is something people want to talk about, you know?
Well, in fact, I liked this question because it led us into one of the topics that I mentioned to you I wanted to talk about, which is social media has really changed from back when some of your early shows. As you said, X was very different. It was not dominated by the world of shorts and TikTok and Instagram. In fact, you probably... reels didn't exist back when you were doing Lover Host.
Right. I mean, you might have created... did you create YouTube videos of Lover Host?
Yeah, I did YouTube videos. Short form did exist. It actually... I look back at some of my early TikToks and we were uploading in 2021 clips of Lover Host and they were getting millions of views. At the time, it was a blind spot for me, and it's a regret of mine that I didn't take it more seriously and didn't understand. I think this is something that I find really interesting about Twitch streamers in general. Twitch is still to this day, it's obviously much bigger than it ever has been in terms of how recognizable it is and its reach. But a lot of people don't realize how insulated we are as a platform in some ways, and especially back then, I was not aware of... I didn't care about anything but Twitch, the numbers on Twitch, the views on Twitch. I didn't care about anything else. And a lot of Twitch streamers, I mean, still to this day feel that way. They don't care about anything else, but there is a huge world of social media out there that can benefit and elevate your brand beyond anything that just Twitch... I mean, sorry, I'm on the Twitch channel, but you know what I mean.
No, actually, no, it's okay. Because in fact, that's the topic. One of the topics I want to talk about is how it's changed in terms of long form and short form. Right. Because I often talk about how short form... people often talk about, oh, how can I get discovered? How can Twitch help me discover? The reality is, short form content is just much better for finding new audiences and even for reaching your existing audience, because they don't have to show up at any time, and all they have to do is watch you for 30 seconds.
And the world's totally changed.
Yeah. So for me personally, like, I have a short form content strategy and I tell the people that I work with that this is the end all be all. I mean, short form is the end all, be all. It has to be the top priority of anything that we do and anything that we produce. Because there needs to be... it needs to start and end with the short form strategy. How are we capitalizing on every singular moment from our broadcast and pushing that out and creating clips and pushing them out into short form on YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, TikToks... that is the strategy. There is no faster way to grow than through short form.
Well, and I think for you, of course there's some people that they create special content just for one of those platforms. For you, you create shows and live content from which you derive short form content. Right? And all of your short form content, for the most part, is downstream of something you have done, rather than just, I'm editing this singular TikTok video and the video just comes from me taking a picture. And I do think that that is one of the things that live streaming really helps for a lot of people, because trying to figure out how to do this quirky TikTok video, it can be tricky. And whereas you just go and create good live content and you say, okay, there are going to be ten shorts from this. What are those ten shorts?
Yeah, yeah. And it's sort of been something that I need to still improve at. I think creators should have a combination of doing the TikTok that's just built for TikTok or built for short form, and there's stream stuff. And I also have doubts as to whether I'm pumping out enough clips from my content. You see these clip farmers and stuff that are just pumping out thousands and thousands of clips. So I'm not really doing that. I haven't employed that strategy, but I'm also a little old school. I come from a quality over quantity type of mentality, and that sort of comes into a little bit of... I mean, there's a new generation on Twitch that I'm not saying they're low quality by any means, but they pump out a lot more.
No, they do. They're very explicit that it is, I'm going to let the algorithms find the good stuff. And then I'm just going to put a lot of stuff out there. And the algorithms will find the good stuff. Whereas you are a little more old school in trying to create ten good clips or something like that.
Yeah. I think, you know, in terms of my Twitch strategy, I still believe that if you give... I've got shows that I do, Lover Host, In the Tub, Name Your Price. You know, I have that flight stream show that I like to do. I just did a show called Gaydar, which is a lot of fun where we're casting people from the public, but in person, using traditional casting agencies live. But I've always stood by my theory and strategy of, I feel like if you create a piece of intellectual property, a show, you need to allow that show some space on its own to develop its own individuality and moment so that you can truly make something that people remember. So that's my goal, like whenever I make a Lover Host or whatever, I don't want to just whip it up the day before. I want to spend a week to two weeks putting together the cast and really curating and strategizing about what will this show look like when we put these people together, and then hyping it up, getting to that moment, creating a show that builds to a crescendo and gives people something that they can remember, and impactful moments so that when you think of Lover Host, you think of those moments, as opposed to just rushing through a content slate. I don't personally... that's not something that I want to do. It's not something... if that's your strategy, that's fine. But I would like things to have a little bit more impact. And I feel like with how quickly things move these days, I feel like we forget a lot about what just happened because they move so quickly.
So I know from our conversations you've evolved a lot in your content. How you approach content on Twitch now, you've gone through periods where you had, with Misfits and other things, where you had third parties that were getting you to produce content. And now you've been thinking more about the production stuff, but then also more about streaming regularly and building community. So talk about how that has changed over the last few years in terms of what you're doing now, how frequently you stream now, and also that experience, because you are always on the production end more so than on the build community end, and you've moved a little bit. So talk a little bit about that.
Well, I think historically I used to be able to get away with doing less. I always thought less is more on Twitch. And I would tweet something, the tweet would get 50 to 100,000 likes of marketing. I would hype it up. The show would go live, it would get 150,000 views, and then I would go dark and get ready for the next show and then hype that up. And I would do two to three shows a month. And that doesn't work anymore. I think for several reasons. Number one, the platform doesn't reward that behavior anymore. So algorithmically on the platform, if you're not live as much, your channel will be at the bottom of everybody's directory. So that hurts. So I have to be live more often to combat against that. The other thing is, people are live more now. This next generation is like people are live more or less in some respects 24/7. And I need to be able to stream more often to keep myself in the conversation.
But you're still not... how many hours a week do you stream now?
Oh, God. Still very little. I mean, I still stream, depending on the week. There are weeks where I go 15 to 20 hours, but there are also weeks where I go... so I think the nature that I... I wish it wasn't that way, but that's just the way it is. And I have to compete. Truly, I don't enjoy sitting at my desktop and talking to my chat as much as I enjoy making shows. That's what I'm here for. I'm here to make shows. I'm here to make events. That's my job. But in order to make those events happen, it needs to be a multi-dimensional strategy where I'm building the shows, but the shows have to feed the desktop, which feeds the next. I need a marketing vehicle to promote my next thing, you know what I mean? And that used to be Twitter. Doesn't exist anymore, right? So I lost that. That was a huge hit.
Right. And so now you need to be that marketing vehicle by at least maintaining some type of regular content creation.
Exactly, exactly. So and this isn't like to be said that I don't want to work as much. I love to work.
You work in a different way than your average streamer. You're... and really, I can't even think of... a lot of times you say, oh, they're unusual, but then you can think of ten people that are kind of like them, right? But I actually can't think of any other streamer that I'd say, oh yeah, they're kind of like an Austin Show in terms of their approach. Can you think of any that you think of?
I mean, the closest... no, not really. I try to think because, you know, I'd say that... yeah, I don't really know of anybody that doesn't stream as much as I do. Yeah.
Well. Also focusing, you know, in many ways, I think something from chat was... and I think I'll ask this question and then I think... did you model yourself after someone or did you just learn to do this as you went along? Like, did you ever take a production class?
No, I just kind of created my own. I knew from the moment I started on Twitch, viewers of Twitch have always thought anybody that's not streaming eight hours a day is not working. So like a lot of people think that when streamers are offline, which in many cases it used to be true, where like the only time we were doing anything was when we were streaming our video game or whatever, and maybe we didn't prepare as much for our streams. But from the very beginning I was like, that's not me. So I would put in... I used to have to adapt to that model, and I would be live three to four hours a day. But I was still called part time back then. I was never called a full time streamer. People would make fun of me for the fact that I wasn't live eight hours a day. So from the very beginning I was like, this isn't me. I very quickly stopped obsessing about the subscriber number and was like, this isn't me, this is not what I'm gonna... this is not sustainable for me. I'm gonna burn out. I don't like that stress. I'm going to carve a niche for myself where I can create meaningful content that isn't as much of a daily presence.
Yeah. Interestingly, and I'll state this as opposed to asking a question because I have something in my mind. I just ask a question and you may go in a different direction, and I don't want to let you do that. No, in a strange way, you're someone in a different life, you would have gone to film or TV school and gone into production. Like in a different world, you could be producing reality TV shows right now. You didn't go into... for whatever reason, when you were going to college and all that, you didn't go into film, TV production. But you really love to do production and you just do it online, right? And you learned it all yourself, as opposed to going and having someone teach you how to do TV production.
Yeah, I mean, I definitely enjoy being in front of the camera. So I think like, you know, my degree is in business administration. I think I would have probably ended up being a commercial airline pilot because that was one of my passions growing up as a kid, which I failed to get into in the beginning here, but laid the foundation, I think, for where I am now. We can go into that if you want. But that's probably what I would end up doing. I don't have as much interest in being exclusively behind.
Like being talent. The reality is you do both. The interesting thing is that you're allowed to do here. Yes, is you're allowed to be in front of the camera. You're allowed to be a Jeff Probst, but you also are coming up with the ideas.
And I like to... I mean, I have a fantastic team that pitches me all the time, but I've always prided myself as having the gut instinct on what's going to hit or what's not going to hit. And what's going to work and what's not going to work. And I think Twitch streamers are uniquely talented in that regard across entertainment, because we have the benefit of getting instant feedback for everything that we do. And I think that develops an intuition unlike any other in entertainment, because a lot of people are having to be... a lot of people are very reactionary, and things in this media landscape are happening so quickly. Twitch streamers, I think, are best equipped to having the best instincts on what is going to be good and what is not. Now, not everybody's going to be that way, of course, but I think that certainly the platform creates an opportunity to develop the best instincts in media.
Yeah. And have you ever been someone that, aside from the people you know, that watches a whole bunch of Twitch?
Have I ever been somebody that watches a whole bunch of Twitch?
Except for there's some streamers, you know.
Well,
Have you ever been someone that watches a whole bunch of Twitch?
