Late with this, since was on vacation and previous post was more important imo, but gonna finish the post that I started before. Not gonna touch the drama part of all that Twitter fiesta, it just escalated far beyond any expectations and one clip out of context and with not very well worded thought started some pop corn worthy fight on Twitter, you can check LSF and all that for drama itself, it already concluded with a lot of apologies btw, which is good, I just gonna post my thoughts on initial statement and all things that it sparked that are not just for the sake of arguing.
Little intro though for those who don’t know – xQc said that most of the streamers are getting paid for their charity streams or participating in one. Obviously it sparked some “how could they” reeing and obviously caused questions so DrLupo posted a statement where he said that he did all his charity streams for free and then fiesta started, that I’m not gonna touch. But let’s talk about the initial statement and discussion about charity streams…
First of all, statement itself is not wrong, but it sounded like big generalization, which is not right, because I don’t think it’s that common to get paid for charity streams and even though I don’t really know behind the scenes of some top streamers and their management orgs, which deals are being made there etc, I’m pretty sure if we take streamers in general then absolute majority is not getting paid anything for doing it. Another thing is that if someone is actually doing paid charity stream they need to disclose it according to laws, so if there would be lots of those streams and that’s quite a well known fact, then a lot of people would be in trouble, which is not the case, so again generalizing like this was probably what caused reaction from some streamers. Obviously some reactions were waytoodank and caused all the shitstorm, but that’s another story, I don’t think xQc is to blame for anything there, especially since it was his regular stream clip where he was playing something and sometimes you don’t mean to sound how you sound there especially if there was context that clip didn’t catch.
Now about paid charity streams – honestly I haven’t heard about those, but I’m a smol streamer and my networking is pretty shit, so I’m not super well versed on this aspect of streaming backstage, but I didn’t get surprised when I hear about such thing and I totally don’t mind it. In my opinion absolutely free profit-less charity streams are great, but there is nothing wrong in streams that were paid for or sponsored. Some people are very idealistic or just have a bit weird picture about how things work, for them if it’s charity then all money by default should be sent there – even venues, staff, travelling, food and other important things should be free, but unfortunately we don’t live in perfect world and that’s not the case, even though there are exceptions too of course. Charity organizations also should work for free or maybe for food, because it’s charity, but again it’s not the perfect world we live in and people working there are regular people like us, who just want to live a decent life and that’s unfortunately impossible without money, again there are some great examples there who sacrifice a lot for charity, who can work on some projects without any payment and do everything for charity (like Maral), but again even they need to eat something, live somewhere and wear clothes. So unfortunately first revelation is that not everything in charity industry goes to charity, it’s like any other industry and there is even marketing involved, because you need to stand out from a bunch of other charities, you need to attract people to work with you, to get people interested in donating for your cause. That’s where paid charity streams go too – every streamer owns a platform, not all of them want to participate in charity, not all of them want to do it here, now and for some particular org, this is where you might want to motivate them, there are many different ways and not all of them are about paying, you can suggest some interesting event to raise funds, you can get other streamers on board who can convince them to join etc. So charities want to get access to their platform to attract people’s attention to their organizations, to their cause, raise money etc, sometimes it’s worth paying for it, let’s say 10000$ paid to streamer who brings 10 times more and raises awareness about some problem and attracts potentially other people to fundraising – worth for sure in my book and in the end everyone is happy – streamer got money, charity got money, viewers got content and did a good thing. So I have no problems with it, even though of course you can say that they could do that for free – sure, but not everyone does and I don’t blame them, it’s their choice, so that might be a choice between paying them or maybe they would do some random fundraiser once in a while on their own or maybe nothing at all.
After all technically for all we raised on my charity stream I got a gift from sponsors and Save the Children paid for Scuffed Late Night Show dinner at Dreamhack Winter, not to mention front page and exposure from all the charity events I participated in, so I guess you can say I profited from charity too. And I totally can recommend everyone streaming to join charity events no matter if you were sponsored to do so or not, more people will increase awareness and attract more people – better for everyone, no matter if they got paid for it or not.