As we get closer to launch, we’re excited to start sharing some more details about what we’re doing that’s different, and why.
We’re psyched about the game community, and one of our core motivations for starting GxStream is to enable game streamers to create better connections with their audiences, and in doing so, create more opportunities for earning money doing so.
We are not going to start off doing ad splits right away. To be honest, advertising revenues only add up to a lot of money in aggregate across an entire site – at the individual stream level; the CPM’s are really low.
For example; let’s say you’re *really* popular, and have 1m views across all your videos. Let’s assume that each viewer watched one ad. Ads are priced as a unit called CPM – which means “what we pay per 1000 viewers of this ad.”
Current prices on a 30 second video ad for user-generated video is about $5.00.
So, for every 1,000 viewers, the site earns $5.00, and if we split 50/50 with you, the streamer, you’d make $2.50 gross (and so would we, except we’ve got some costs to cover with that:).
Multiply that across your 1m viewers, and you’ve earned $2,500 total, for your stream.
There are some ways to get higher CPM’s – but that’s a topic for another post soon.
This brings us back to building better ways for you to make money streaming your gameplay – but it’s going to take some work on your side too.
We think there’s a better way to measure how much you engage with your audience, and give them better ways to engage with you if they like your video stream.
Your audiences will be able to reward you directly with ways to upgrade your stream, or go ad free.
But you will have to earn that from your audience.
We also think there’s a better way to rank streams than just by how many viewers or how many likes each video has. So we’ve built a new way to rank streams that will help even the smaller streamers have a better shot at breaking into the top ranks.
But again, you’ll have to earn it.
That’s where our core difference lies; we’re mashing up a bit of StackOverflow, a little bit of Reddit, a little bit of Foursquare, and a little bit of Twitch. Our platform measures every time you talk to your audience and how engaged they are with your stream and rewards you for that.
So if you’ve got a hundred fans you love, who love talking with you and watching you, you will rank higher than someone who has a 1000 viewers but they’re not interacting with their audience.
It’s not just about about badges, it’s about community-building game mechanics that make live video streaming a better experience for both the streamers and your audience; and we’re pretty damn excited about it.
We’re also adding in some features you’re going to love, and we’ll have more details on those coming out soon as well.
One last thing about GxStream, is that we are not just a website. We could have pushed up a live streaming website a couple of months ago, but we wanted to go bigger than that. We spent about 2 months building a robust, from-the-ground-up API that will be public, and built our own site on top of that foundation.
So if you want to build your own channel app for iOS or Android? You’ll be able to sign up for our developers program and do just that (and oh yes, we’re already testing video streams on iOS – they look great even over Airplay to the big screen!). If you want to be able to pull your GxStream achievements onto your own site where you can show them off along side your videostream? Hit the API.
We’re excited to encourage, support and see what kind of things get built on our core services, and we felt strongly about getting that right before building the site itself.
We put up our beta signup page back in October, and started coding in December – so we’ve knocked out quite a lot of code in less than 4 months, and very soon y’all will get to start checking it out in more detail.
GxStream is really looking forward to giving all our streamers the best tools and the best service out there.
If you’re not already signed up for our beta list, hit it up at http://signup.gxstream.com and we’ll see you soon.