
Mira
357 posts

Mira
@mirabelinde
I make videos on (modded) Minecraft and other games.


Many creators don’t think properly about how people find them. Understanding funnels is the best way I know to get someone to take an action you want (view, follow, buy, etc.) Here's some of the most valuable stuff I know about content creator discovery 🧵-> Witness this ice cream cone I drew (I’m a marketer, not an artist) with three parts. Top, middle, and bottom. Your goal is to get someone to take the action you want. So how does this happen? Each part of the funnel operates as follows: Top: Initial discovery. A person finds out who you are. Potential actions here are a follow, comment, subscribe, or even engagement like an RT or a like. Middle: Interest. A person finds out more about you and your product, and makes a commitment of either their time or money. This is usually a subscription, for creators. (Twitch/Patreon). Bottom: Buying decision. You’ve won trust or solved a problem and someone is willing to pay you for that. This is buying a product of yours, or subscribing more than one month. I’m just going to write about top and middle funnels today, because it’s where most people go wrong. - Best Top Platform Funnels Where People First DISCOVER You: X, Youtube, Tiktok, Instagram, Facebook. (in order of best to worst, for most creators*) - Middle Funnels Where People Get INVESTED in You: Livestreaming Websites (Twitch etc.), Patreon, email newsletters, lead magnets (info pdfs, etc), learning resources. The biggest mistake I see people make is trying to get discovered on a middle funnel platform, or trying to make money on a top funnel platform. You CAN do it but everything will feel difficult. This is because platforms are built to accomplish different things. Livestreaming sites for example are NOT top funnel platforms, except for the top 10 streamers in each category. Everyone got confused because livestreaming platforms began as top funnel platforms (5+ years ago) where it was easy to get discovered. But they evolved (devolved?) into mid funnel platforms where the main value is your audience getting to know you better. Yes you CAN grow on these platforms but you would be so much better off creating on a top funnel platform and then filtering viewers to your stream. There are nameless thousands of streamers grinding hours as you read this for a few follows an hour. Don’t make me show the math on the $ per hour value here, it’s grim. Even the largest streamers actually source most of their audience from their Youtubes, not from streaming sites. So you want a top funnel platform that’s algorithmically designed to get you discovered from the ground up. X and Youtube are top tier discovery platforms. A lot of new people will find you. They’re built with discovery in mind. However their core focus isn’t making creators money necessarily and they can be poor monetization platforms. Again you can do it, but you’d be much better off directing X and Youtube viewers further down the funnel to an actual product, or Patreon if you don’t want to build that. Twitch/Patreon/Email are great middle funnels. People who have heard of you can learn more about you, and eventually support you with built-in subscription options there. This is one of the reasons I encourage EVERYONE to have a Patreon (or equivalent) almost no matter what you do. It’s the best mid funnel because it takes 5-12% of your money instead of 50% (Twitch) and 30-55% (Youtube) and accomplishes the same thing. It’s always insane to me that most creators give up a substantial 40-50% of their income BEFORE TAXES to platform splits. This is a huge amount of money and you should not direct viewers to these funnels if you can avoid it. For most creators, your funnel ends at subscribing. You’re losing a lot of potential though because you have viewers interested in you who would buy something else. So you could consider things like apparel, workshops, consulting, greater access, or white label products you like and it would 2x to 10x your income. Even for small creators this could represent a substantial increase in income over time. I’d encourage everyone to draw out a simple MSPaint funnel for their own business. It’s a quick and easy plan that will make your entire business much more effective. Think about: - Where are two places your potential viewer/customer spends the MOST amount of their time? - How do customers learn and hear about you? Where are these people coming from? - What mid-step could I create (or promote more) that would get viewers/customers more interested in what I’m doing? Picture below here is the best funnel [currently] available for MOST creators. Lots of exceptions and it changes all the time. For example, political creators #1 funnel is Facebook, a lot of people can make it on Tiktok, etc. It’s not gospel so much as to help you build out your own thought process on this. My goal in writing this is for you to build out your unique situation in your head and make a model that’s best for you. If this helped you and you’d like more of my writing on this, please RT this for someone else. Bookmarks also help the algo understand this is valuable. If there’s a lot of interest in writing like this I’ll keep doing them. People told me to stop rageposting as much (I'm not gonna) but this time I wrote something useful instead. If you have something you want me to write about, tell me. There's not much of a hook or "buy this" at the end here really, but I did put a more in-depth video guide about this on Patreon. Thanks for reading.










The livestream/Twitch viewbot issue is way more prevalent and destructive for platforms than most people realize. It's a difficult problem and no one knows how to fix it yet. When my agency was running ads on Twitch, we noticed a weird problem: Our brand's conversions were worse the more viewers a stream had. The largest streams have the least sales. 500-1000 viewer streams often have the best sales, and outperform many 30,000+ viewer creators. We initially attributed this to diminishing viewer returns - AKA - not everyone in large streams is as invested as core, small communities. This is untrue though because the few large streams that do have authentic viewership overperform on ad campaigns. So it had to be something else. We did some digging and were shocked at the number of top 500 broadcasters that are being viewbotted or view botting themselves. We estimate it is around 400 to 430 of the top 500, not including embeds. It is incredibly easy to do. Up until a couple weeks ago in 2025 you could literally open multiple headless browser windows to count as +1 viewer, and even now you can still count 2 viewers on two separate incognito browsers (go try it.) Twitch finally recently fixed this, so the current strategy is to spin up thousands of proxies through a service like AWS (ironically) and DigitalOcean. Twitch doesn't punish anyone for view botting (unless a streamer shows it on screen) because according to them, "we can't know if its the streamer or someone else." However even then their enforcement is selective, with celebrities like Ray J openly admitting in July to viewbotting and getting no punishment. Because discovery is non-existent on Twitch and the platform is a Kingmaker system, there's no reason to not view bot unless you have a moral compass - a rare thing in streaming these days. Viewbots are not only set up by streamers themselves, but also agencies and managers. This is to fool sponsors (like me) into paying $20,000+ (about $1-3 per ccv) for viewers that are not there. In 2025, most major brands have already run campaigns with horrible results, and so they and their agencies simply don't advertise on Twitch anymore. The untold story is millions gone from creators and the livestreaming platforms themselves because of this. This combines with the Adpocalypse I wrote about here some months ago, where I predicted a 40-50% ad revenue drop due to Twitch platforming controversial political content. This ended up being exactly what happened, and this one-two combo puts Twitch on a difficult path. I suspect the most prominent viewbotting streamers will be revealed in the coming months, one way or another. It's an open secret in the industry, and some broadcasters know where the bodies are buried. It's only a matter of time before someone blabs. No one will miss these offenders, and they're usually synonymous with pushing scam sponsors and exploiting their viewers in various ways. Thankfully more attention is also recently coming to the matter via folks in the know such as (@Trainwreckstv and @Asmongold) - and I would trust their posts and clips on the subject entirely. They know a lot more than people give them credit for and the fact that they're both on a very small list of people who have made it legitimately pisses them off enough to educate others about it. If you're concerned with this problem @Twitch, you need to setup manual investigative teams to analyze top Twitch streams, take down botnets, and issue C&Ds to major providers. You probably can't win the war from an engineering standpoint, for a lot of reasons beyond the scope of this thread. Anyone working on the problem at Twitch or Kick, feel free to DM me and I'll help if I can. The livestreaming platforms aren't incentivized to do the right thing because more viewers equals more sponsor deals and a better "looking" platform. But what goes around comes around, and the bill will come due. This exact thing happened in esports, when most brands during 2019-2021 realized that teams couldn't convert product sales like they claimed. Fast forward today and esports is a fraction of its original power and mostly owned by foreign interests and gambling proxies. The people hurt the most by these bad actors are the legitimate creators trying to make it. If you're one of these people, you're playing a rigged game by trying to funnel new viewers in from livestreaming platforms. You should be doing VOD and value creation on @YouTube (events, story-driven video) and driving those viewers into places like @Patreon that offer fair creator splits. Twitch hasn't invested successfully in small creator discovery for a decade and you are on your own. The platform will hobble onward so long as Amazon can justify the profit loss in exchange for its media impact and times are good. You don't need to be caught in that downward spiral by being dependent on it. Diversify (multistream) and don't be a victim. Livestreaming will never be taken seriously by major sponsors unless these problems are addressed. Until then (if ever) the industry will be a shadow of what it could be.





