Two years ago, Ludwig Ahgren left Twitch for YouTube.
“I felt more appreciated by YouTube than I did by Twitch,” he says in his newest Mogul Mail video (below). “They made me feel like a person. They made me feel seen. It felt like our goals were aligned. In Twitch, I felt like another cog in the machine. And it didn’t hurt that YouTube was also offering me more money.”
So, now that his two-year contract is up and he has the choice to continue with YouTube or go to another platform, how is he feeling about the chances of making a livestreaming career on YouTube?
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Well, not great.
But he–despite the title of this video being I’m Going Back to Twitch–is still willing to stick it out with YouTube for another year.
That gives us two main questions to answer:
- Why is he staying at YouTube?
- Why is he unhappy with YouTube?
First, why he’s staying: Ludwig explains that in the process of moving over to YouTube, he realized that his goal from livestreaming isn’t to make the most money; it’s to get the most viewership. On YouTube, he was able to achieve peak viewership of 303,000 concurrent viewers, which is the highest he’s ever had in his career. And, since he started streaming there, viewership for his VODs has gone up, too, from an average of 500,000 views per video to over a million.
(Average viewership for streams dropped from 18.5k on Twitch to around 17k on YouTube, but Ahgren says that’s not a big concern to him.)
He’s also staying because he was able to renegotiate his contract so it allows simulcasting of events on both YouTube and Twitch. (To be clear: That allowance is just for events, not for daily streams. His daily streams will still live solely on YouTube.)
“My goal, simply put, is to do really cool events that I think are cool and also dope and also have them be seen by the most amount of people,” he says. “The biggest cultural event possible. If I pour my heart into something, I want it to be seen by others. I don’t even care if it makes money. I’m capping myself if I’m only streaming these events on YouTube, or if I’m only streaming them on Twitch. It’d be a lot better if I streamed them on both.”
He aims to produce an event at least once every two months. The first of them, a “creator dodgeball world championship,” airs this Sunday, Dec. 10, and features six teams of creators, each representing a different platform and/or content type. Teams YouTube, Twitch, Kick, Facebook, Podcasts, and Chess/Boxing will face off to see which can dodge a wrench ball the best.
The event will air on Ahgren’s main YouTube channel, but over on Twitch, it’ll air from side channel twitch.tv/mogulmoves. Ahgren says his contract with YouTube stipulates he must simulcast events to a Twitch channel that “didn’t make people think I was a full-time Twitch streamer.”
So, with all this going according to plan, why isn’t Ahgren happy with YouTube?
“I have to admit there are some problems, and those problems, in the two years that I’ve been here, haven’t been addressed at the speed that I or other livestreamers would like,” he explains.
Here’s a list of those problems:
The main ones, Ahgren says, are the time caps YouTube imposes on livestreams and VODs. Streams cannot run longer than 12 hours, and VODs over six hours can’t be edited. That means if something gets copyright struck in the middle of a video (maybe someone’s doing an IRL stream and they walk past a store with a song playing), they can’t edit the VOD to take that part out; they just have to delete the VOD altogether.
Ahgren says his company Truffle aims to help with some of the issues he raised, but his main concern is that YouTube doesn’t seem keen on making things more hospitable for livestreamers in the near future.
“My concern is that YouTube doesn’t care about livestreaming,” he says. “They care about something else that you’ll probably see on the home screen if you open up YouTube right now: YouTube Shorts.”
Ahgren goes on to say he thinks TikTok is an existential threat to YouTube, and he believes YouTube also thinks that, so is putting most of its focus into developing Shorts.
“What isn’t a concern of theirs is the title ‘Twitch has killed YouTube,’ because that’ll never happen,” he says. “I don’t think Twitch is entering the VOD space. I don’t think they’re trying to compete there. I think they’re just chilling in the livestream space […] and so they have almost like this handshake agreement, where Twitch is the massive shareholder. They have the majority viewership for all livestreaming. And YouTube has been floating around, just doing their thing. They haven’t gone up too much, they haven’t gone down too much. Facebook’s on the down and down, Kick’s nowhere to be seen. And there’s no real need to rush into being a better product than Twitch. Or to beating Twitch. Because Twitch will never kill YouTube. TikTok will. That’s how it feels.”
Ahgren says his plan is to give YouTube one more year. Presumably if it doesn’t start putting more effort into supporting livestreamers by then, he’ll look at exiting back to Twitch.
