A lot of people say I’m a journalist, but I tend to call myself a content creator whose content is news.

If anybody wants to ask me any questions directly, I'm live, they can come and ask…we talk the business of being a content creator.

So any time that anybody reading this would want to chat, I'm available. You should come to Twitch.

I don't see the value proposition in Twitter Blue, other than if you reply to people, then you end up appearing higher in search results….

I think that I'm …creating engaging content that is valuable for people, content that they're compelled to share themselves.

Typically, people don't go from Twitter to saying, ‘Hey, I'm going to give you money.’ They typically say, ‘Oh, I'm going to find out your other content such as your newsletter, your Twitch account, your YouTube videos, etc.’

If somebody's going to watch you live for 1, 2, 10 hours a week, there's a pretty compelling reason why they might follow you to other places.

People don't think of Twitch as a place to find education, they think of it as gaming, as entertainment…People don't realize that people are doing Business content on Twitch.

Livestream ad revenue share is minimal…the vast majority of money that comes from Twitch is fan-funding. It’s people wanting to interact with the stream or subscriptions that they pay for (that I get half of because Twitch takes half).

I was thinking, 'You know what, I still want a level of control to make it like a website so that if I do want to pivot into more written content, I don't have to be stuck in a newsletter ecosystem exclusively.'

And so that's when Ghost came into my radar….So far, it's been absolutely fantastic.

I particularly like trying to keep an eye on things that are happening in Asian markets. It's not very easy to look at Asian livestreamers and try to find something in English.

Google Alerts tends to do a pretty good job at capturing some of that stuff after the fact.

Yeah, one of the things that I love about live is the direct community aspect of it. The direct feedback, the direct interaction.…As you're talking about something, new people can come in with expertise and add their point of view to it… so you get a lot of really interesting insight from a lot of different people very quickly. And that kind of community aspect feels great to me.

Everything kind of spawns from Twitch. When you're live, it's the best place to communicate. But when your channel is not live, there's no reason to be on it….So, Discord provides a really great way to continue the conversation.

The reason why I switched away from Patreon to Ghost is that I wanted a layer of control that Patreon wasn't able to offer in terms of customization. I wanted to…have connections to Twitch and other platforms.

Perhaps a notifier that I could say ‘Hey, this person subscribe to TOS.gg’ on my send…’Oh, this person who’s replying to me on Twitter, they subscribe to my newsletter.’ I might make sure to reply to them.

I'm ultimately trying to make it so that I'm more available to people who are supporting me, either with a free account or a paid account….

With Ghost, it's just a little bit easier to make all that possible.

One of the things that I learned in the past was that you kind of have a budget of how much people are willing to listen to your sponsored content before they tune it out….I'm very specific about what I accept.

Just recently, I wrapped up an eight-week project with 7- Eleven. They sponsored me to host a late night show on my Twitch channel…

So why do I take these kind of offers?

Because they present opportunities that I think will still offer value to the people who watch and support me.

I consider the people who are watching, listening, and reading what I'm doing to be part of my community. I want what I do to be valuable to them.

The mentality is comparing 150 viewers to a 10,000 view YouTube video or a 100,000 view TikTok. Which one is going to think sounds better? It’s going to be the higher number.

I don't believe there's a true value placed on what live streaming offers in terms of intention versus attention.

When people are watching you live, they're more likely to do something because they're listening to you in real time.

I originally started streaming with XSplit…Eventually, OBS ended up eclipsing XSplit, a paid product, which is quite shocking. The features, functions, plugin capability, and the things you can do with OBS just overshadow everything else in live streaming…everyone kind of defaults back to OBS eventually because of its flexibility and how easy it is to customize.

It does take a level of effort to figure it out…There are a billion tutorials online that make it super easy.

When I go live on Twitch, my username updates to say that I'm live now, which then acts as a banner. And then, because I'm sharing good content that other people are sharing to their own audiences, it shows 'Live Now' for every single retweet.

So people end up coming to my Twitch stream from that. It's automated.

My mom is my accountant so it's it's all in house in that regard.