Rich Streamers get Richer
Twitch.tv is a website for streaming video games online. People sign up for accounts, and then they can broadcast their gameplay over the website. Aside from the sheer enjoyment of playing games, it is fun for the players to share their experience with their viewers, the more viewers the merrier. Also, of course, more viewers means ad revenue and subscriptions, both of which generate money for the streamer (and for Twitch). So on scales of both money and personal fun and fulfillment, more viewers makes for a “richer” streamer.
Now comes the unfortunate part. In class, we used the example of website pages to show that pages with more incoming links are more likely to get more incoming links, leading to the “rich get richer” effect. Since each Twitch streamer essentially has their own webpage on Twitch, this model applies, and is reinforced by the Twitch community as well. For example, the Twitch homepage “features” a couple channels. These channels are usually channels that already have thousands of viewers. Or if you scroll a little and select a game that you are interested in watching, it directs you to a page with a list of streamers who are streaming that game, but again these are streamers that already have hundreds or thousands of viewers. Therefore, the more popular your stream, the easier it is for people to find it and the more likely you are to acquire more viewers.
Online discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitch/comments/2493la/rich_get_richer_and_poor_go_no_where/