Will you join us in taking a look at the top live-streaming platforms in the world by website traffic because I hope this will be helpful if you are trying to see how many visitors can come to a live-streaming website based on how that website is ranked in Alexa? Using this data, I see the huge benefit to live streaming on multiple platforms simultaneously to get the most viewers. Here are my current top three choices!
- https://dlive.io/@jerrybanfield has the best engagement and earning potential because of our community here on Steem.
- https://www.youtube.com/jerrybanfield offers the best viral video possibility and long term organic traffic.
- https://www.facebook.com/jbanfield helps me bring more people off of Facebook to
and YouTube.
In addition to these three, I try to stream on a few more of the top platforms to reach the most people possible! Here are the top live-streaming platforms by global traffic ranking.
Top Live Streaming Platforms by Global Alexa Ranking and Earning Potential?
#1 YouTube
Number one is YouTube.
Now, what I've done is I've sorted this in order of global Alexa rank. YouTube is the number two ranked website in the world in terms of visitors according to Alexa.com which is an Amazon company ranking website traffic.
Now, these numbers are estimates from Alexa and this gives a very good indication as to which live-streaming website can we hope to get the very most views on assuming we just put videos up every day, we promote and share them and we can respond to feedback.
YouTube is by far the best opportunity to get the most people to watch a live stream over time when we include everyone who might watch. Now, you might be able to get more viewers on Facebook on the stream live, but consider over the next ten years that people can watch videos that were live streamed on YouTube whereas they will be hard to find on Facebook unless occasionally you get a viral video.
YouTube is the number one website in terms of traffic, in terms of getting people to view a video and a live stream, and in terms of, therefore, being able to make money from a live stream.
Now, that said, YouTube also has a lot of people live streaming, so it may not be the very best opportunity to actually get started from zero. It does definitely have the very most upward potential.
#2 Facebook
Number two in this list, number three in global rank in terms of website traffic according to Alexa is Facebook.com.
Now, if we count the actual amount of time people spend on a website instead of just the raw number of visits people make to a website, Facebook is likely the number one website in the world where people actually spend time on the website.
That means Facebook is very good for getting people to watch while you are live, especially because you already have more than likely some friends, maybe even a Facebook group or a page, and those resources are very helpful for actually getting people to watch.
Therefore, the ideal solution to live streaming is to be able to live stream both, either at the same time, or similar content, or alternatively to Facebook and YouTube.
Facebook and YouTube obviously provide huge amounts of upward potential.
YouTube has a higher ranking global traffic on Alexa than Facebook and this is indicative that for live streams on Facebook, it's very unlikely anyone will ever see that more than a few hours after you have live-streamed it.
Occasionally you might get a viral live stream that people will share and watch for years. Maybe one out of 10,000 live streams have that property. 99.99% of the time you live stream on Facebook, if people don't watch it within the first anywhere from 24 to 48 hours to maybe a week at most, if people don't watch it by then, you are very unlikely to get anyone to watch the video.
Now, YouTube, even if only five people watch the live stream, you could get a viral video with millions of views out of a live stream that hardly anyone would watch. I know because I did exactly that. I live streamed a "League of Legends" coaching session where hardly anyone actually watched the live stream and it turned into a viral video with almost a million views on it. I didn't even do anything to promote the video, it just took off by itself.
On Facebook, to my knowledge, none of my live streams ever could be watched and consistently watched for more than a week after I did them.
So, even though Facebook is number two in this ranking, even though it may be number one in terms of the amount of time people spend watching it, YouTube offers an exponentially better opportunity than Facebook to live stream.
#3 Twitter
Twitter has its own live streaming platform, Periscope. I've looked at the Twitter ranking here because while technically Periscope is on a different domain, live streams from Periscope go out on Twitter, and Twitter has the chance to promote them.
If you have an active Twitter community live streaming on Periscope, which goes directly into Twitter is an awesome opportunity, although it suffers from the same limitation as Facebook. If people don't watch the stream immediately, they are very unlikely to discover it far into the future.
Twitter as a website has a very high global ranking, therefore, it is a good website to live stream on using Periscope, especially if you have an existing audience.
Starting from zero on Twitter is probably not necessarily worth it. If you have already been using Twitter, then Twitter is a good option to live stream. Twitter presents one of the best live-streaming opportunities today in terms of just getting an audience.
Now, if you have got an audience on Facebook and Twitter, more than likely you will be able to get more views on Facebook versus Twitter. If you can do both though, it might be ideal.
However, if you can choose between YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, YouTube is probably the best option for the long term.
#4 Instagram
Even though Instagram is in the top 14 websites in the world and has a lot of users spending a ton of time on it every day, Instagram's live streaming is very difficult to discover if not impossible after 24 hours or so last time I used it anyway.
Thus Instagram presents another good opportunity to just go live quickly on a phone and interact with followers. However, as I've seen on my live streams, to get the very most views and have the highest impact and actually earn money, you want people to be able to discover the stream for years even if a relatively small number of people only watch it.
Instagram is another outstanding option to live stream in terms of the traffic at number14 globally. There is massive upward possible potential doing live streams on Instagram, it's certainly worth testing.
#5 Twitch
Now, we go to Twitch.TV.
Twitch is up to 31 in the global rankings. Amazon bought Twitch, which means you have got the power of Amazon behind live streaming on Twitch.
Twitch does have the opportunity to get you monetized with a lot of built-in monetization options, which Facebook, Twitter and Instagram do not have, and Twitch's may even be better than YouTube's.
The problem on Twitch again is getting discovered, if you have done a live stream a year ago, it's very unlikely it will go viral on Twitch.
You have got to have the viewers on the actual stream itself. That said, there are a lot of viewers. Twitch is just for live streams and you can watch videos on it, but most of the Twitch traffic is live streams, which means in terms of live viewers you have probably got some of the most on Twitch compared to Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.
Twitch probably has one of, if not the second-largest audience after YouTube of people actually watching live streams. Therefore, Twitch is a great place to build an audience because even though Twitch is ranked lower globally than Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, almost everyone on Twitch is there for a live stream, which means you have got a very focused audience.
If you go all in on Twitch and you can work an exact niche, I’d say Twitch is a very good opportunity to live stream full time. That said, most of my friends that have tried live streaming on Twitch have gone almost nowhere.
I hit the Twitch homepage one day and it's very hard to actually make money on Twitch without streaming every single day for hours and hours. On YouTube, even if you just stream once a week, you can do really well on it with recurring ad revenue.
Twitch.TV is an outstanding live-streaming opportunity when you combine what the audience is doing with the global rank of the website.
Now, I bet if you have been a seasoned live streamer and you have seen a lot of different websites, this might be a first unless you have watched a lot of stuff I've done already.
#6 Steemit
Steemit.com is the number one user interface for the Steem blockchain, which is a cryptocurrency that I think has the only serious chance to be number one over Bitcoin over the next five or ten years.
When we compare something like Twitter and Periscope, Steemit.com is the main user interface for the Steem blockchain where there is also a live streaming app or website, Dlive.io, which does live streaming on the Steem blockchain, and can always be viewed then from Steemit.com similar to how when you live stream on Periscope, it goes out to Twitter then, at least it does on mine.
What is exciting about Steemit.com is a rapid rise in the global traffic that you can see here: https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/steemit.com.
You can see the excitement in Steem with these big waves of huge up surges in traffic because Steem out of these websites is making huge gains.
Twitch has also done great in going up in the rankings recently. Instagram has gone up significantly. Still, a lot of these websites are a bit stagnant like Twitter. Facebook.com I would say is peaking. YouTube has got a solid spot where it is at.
One of the best opportunities to live stream can be to hop on something that's growing early. Imagine if you'd have been one of the first people to hop on Youtube.com, or even here's a great example, if you were one of the first Twitch live streamers, you got a very good opportunity to build a massive audience from nothing.
Steemit.com provides the same opportunity.
In my case, I had a big audience before I went on Steemit.com and now I've built one of the largest followings on Steemit.com, and that translates to the best opportunity I found to earn by live streaming.
Steemit is the easiest method to get started earning something, I'm not saying you are going to earn a full-time income.
In fact, you might be lucky to get a dollar or two on a live stream, but see how hard it is to get a dollar or two on a live stream on some of these other websites, and then you will see what a difference it makes to at least consistently earn something.
Steemit.com, especially when you combine blogging with the ability to invest, and then live stream, I think it is the opportunity of a lifetime. That's why I make a post on Steemit.com every day and I've put a huge part of my business into things we can see on Steemit.com.
#7 Periscope
Now, we go to Periscope.TV.
We can see from here that this is Twitter's live streaming domain at Pscp.TV.
We can see this actually peaked a bit and has been dropping. I don't know if it will go back up or not, but I guess initially a lot of interest growing about Periscope, and then dropping off a bit.
We can see then that this may not be the ideal live-streaming opportunity. It's got good traffic, especially when you have got the traffic having a big up, and then it looks like for a year the traffic has gone down.
Now, a lot of people may just be watching on Twitter.com, which is one of the world's top domains. So, it can be difficult to turn a live stream on Periscope into money.
However, it does seem like if you can live stream to several platforms at once as I do, it can be worth it. I will be including pscp.tv to do some more tests in here.
#8 Mixer
Now, the next website we get to for live streaming is Mixer.com.
Mixer is Microsoft's live streaming website and it formerly was Beam. We can see some healthy growth on Mixer with a huge increase in the rankings recently, which is good. Mixer.com may be another one of those niche opportunities to jump on something that's newer before it goes more mainstream.
That said, I've done live streams on Mixer and it's very difficult to get anyone to watch on there and actually interact. The audience is relatively small still. If you go all in on it though, you might be able to get a lot done.
It's not immediately obvious to me how to do good monetization from my stream on Mixer either. It does have the unique ability to do a lag-free live stream where I can literally have a point three-second delay, which I think is called Tachyon.
Mixer.com has their own live streaming software that is very easy to use and has a lag-free experience, and I think that is one of the best parts about Mixer, and that might make it worth jumping in on.
#9 Smashcast
Smashcast.tv is another one I've tried.
It had a peak here and now it has consistently gone down in traffic. I'm not live streaming on Smashcast.tv anymore.
There's just almost no one watching on it. I have had a hard time gaining even one or two viewers on Smashcast when one of them is me.
You can see that some of these live-streaming platforms that are smaller like Smashcast, there's a big initial interest and excitement, and then they drop off.
That is what has happened there.
#10 Dlive
Now, here's the live-streaming platform that I think is the best opportunity to actually earn some money on without even having to buy anything. You don't have to spend money advertising or relentlessly promoting to your friends, you can literally start a stream from nothing on Dlive.io and have a good opportunity to earn.
Now, this is the one I said goes back to being on Steemit.com. If you live stream on Dlive.io, just like with Periscope going on Twitter, Dlive.io does go on Steemit.com.
What we see is a massive rapid rise in the traffic rankings to Dlive.io, which is continuing to go up and up as more people on the Steem blockchain start using Dlive.io and as more live streamers start coming to Dlive.io to earn more than on other platforms.
When I first started on Dlive.io the traffic was down on the graph, there was rarely one or two live streams up at once. There is now anywhere from twenty to fifty up almost every day.
It's a much smaller community and it's relatively reasonable to expect that starting out from nothing, you could at least earn a dollar or two on one or two live streams a day, and if you integrate that with blogging on the Steem blockchain, which we can see on Steemit.com, I think Dlive.io may be one of those things. It is brand-new, the traffic is there, the money is there, the users, the streamers are there, and jumping on it right away might be a fantastic opportunity.
I try to live stream every week on Dlive.io and I also do my live streams on YouTube and on Facebook. I'm starting to do them on Periscope again and I'm not fooling with Instagram anymore. I try to do them on Twitch as often as possible.
All my live streams go out on Steemit.com as well. I also try to use Mixer, but I am not doing Smashcast anymore.
I hope this list of these live-streaming websites is helpful for you because I looked around for lists like this a lot. I wanted to know what were the top websites and I've tried to put everything in a very easy way to look at, and review.
If you want to live stream, these are the best places I know of to do it. If I've forgotten anything, will you please let me know? That way I can discover it. I may have missed some new thing that's come up or I just may have somehow not noticed something that's also at the top.
Thank you for reading this. I love you. You are awesome. If you found this post helpful on Steem, would you please upvote it and follow me because you will then be able to see more posts like this in your home feed?
Love,
Jerry Banfield with edits by @gmichelbkk on the transcript from @deniskj
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