YouTube released its beta of live streaming to content creators who have over 15,000 subscribers on their channel in June of 2016. As a YouTuber with 30,000 subscribers and 250,000 monthly views, I was eager to test live streaming with my audience. Over the past 3-months, I’ve worked closely with a community of fellow YouTubers from Finland, the UK, and India who introduced me to the elusive “Live Stream Billboards.” This underground marketing channel is believed by many creators to be the beginnings of a billion dollar industry.
Twitch along with other similar platforms have pioneered live streaming and marketers have been desperately trying to figure out successful ways to leverage them. I’ve seen a few tactics developing on Twitch with gaming, but from my research on YouTube’s streaming community, I can already see it is drastically more advanced.
To properly describe how these extremely effective live streaming billboards are executed by YouTubers, I deconstructed the process into steps from start to finish.
STEPS
Step 1: How To Live Stream on YouTube
To start a stream YouTube requires 15,000 subscribers, 3rd party “enabling software” (Best free software is OBS) that acts as a server, and a streaming “key” that YouTube provides.
Once the stream is live, your subscribers are notified to begin watching and commenting in real time. Live streams can last as long as you can produce content.
Step 2: The Description
Over the past few months I’ve tested dozens of descriptions and I’ve had links in live streams that lasted 7-days driving 2,000+ people to another YouTube channel. The live stream’s description is the most important part of the campaign.
The most recent stream campaign I launched was 4 simultaneous streams on a channel with 30,000 subscribers, which drove an average of 300 new subscribers per day to a YouTube channel. This campaign cost $100 and was alongside 5 other channel links for 7-days.
This “stream billboard” was live 24/7 and had bit.ly tracking links for each customer. By the end of the week, all channels roughly received 1500 new subscribers.
Step 3: The Presentation
The video stream presented to subscribers should consist of multiple parts. Showcasing the livecount.net feeds of the corresponding channels in the description I found to be the most successful. This lets subscribers see how quickly the channels are growing, creating a “jones effect” to drive more clicks in the description.
Step 4: The Call To Action
So far in my experience with, the best strategy I’ve seen is providing giveaways to incentivize viewers to click the description links. With an average of 5 other links in the description surrounding yours sometimes the creator hosting the stream will offer overall giveaways to help with engagement.
Here are some examples I’ve seen used in descriptions:
“Join to win a free iPad”
“New subscribers are entered to win a free phone case!”
“Subscribe to enter and win a free YouTube channel”
“Follow this link for a 14-day trial!”
The primary goal of my research has been to see if these “live stream billboards” could work for startups. The overwhelming answer is YES.
On average they are performing 2x better than any acquisition channel I’ve tested within the past year.
Think of these streams as a 24/7 advertisement that subscribers opt-in to.
Step 5: YouTube Steaming KEYS
The stream key that YouTube provides for syncing with your 3rd party enabling software is similar to the keys to a car. Whoever holds the key can control the channel’s stream.
When working with this community of YouTubers I saw that they were exchanging keys to stream on each other’s channels. This type of collaboration key sharing is unheard of even in the YouTube community and was fascinating to watch.
For example:
if I gave PewDiePie (largest YouTuber in the world) the key to stream on my channel, he would be able to stream to my subscribers, directly on my channel. On the inverse, if I had PewDiePie’s key I’d be able to stream to his 50,000,000 subscribers. This is high risk and YouTube doesn’t recommend it.
Stream Keys
Stream keys are meant to be kept personal and not to be shared with other channels but while watching this community streaming on each other’s channels, everyone increased their value, exponentially.
For Beginners
For beginners preparing to use YouTube as a marketing channel, I recommend keeping your keys personal and testing with stream billboards for other YouTube channels. Once you get used to streaming for channels you can expand into promoting your service or product.