A Rebuttal

I'm not sure if skill dying to entertainment is necessarily the correct way of putting it. I know other people have mentioned it, but people that follow due to skill tend to stick around more than those who show up for a gimmick. But most of all, I think it's just two separate groups of people that enjoy content in different ways.

Think of it this way, the people that come for the entertainment are the people that are more likely to float between lots of forms of that entertainment. They'll check YouTube, Twitter, twitch, etc. all to see what the current buzz is. These are the people that follow hundreds or even thousands of streams of content, so they're more likely to show up, absorb even a small amount of it, leave the seemingly obligatory like or follow, and then move on. Now you have the other side, the kind that finds a certain content provider and sticks with them. These people don't branch out a whole lot, but the people they do follow the content of they are fiercly loyal to. I'm sure off the top of your head you can already think of that handful of people that are there no matter what you're doing. Since they don't float around a lot, they don't bump up those numbers, but they're likely to stick with you through thick and thin.

I also have only anecdotal evidence, but I've noticed that any time I or someone I know plays to a gimmick, that particular stream or tweet explodes, but after a little while things return to normal. It's why I rarely streamed when I didn't have a good method to do so. Sure everybody hyped up the "poverty streams", but after a while the gimmick wore off and except for that super loyal group, things ended up pretty quiet. I don't pay a ton of attention to the numbers, and I'm small potatoes compared to just about everybody else out there, but I've found that my real "growth" comes from consistency and providing the same kind of content over and over, with a few twists or special events along the way. People that always try to play to the new hot trends very rarely see true success, they're the ones that are complaining about changes or constantly worrying about how their numbers are fluctuating, because they don't have that foundation.

So while a certain tweet or video or stream may bring a lot of numbers, without a solid base to build on, you'd be constantly struggling to keep people interested and not have them just move on to the next hot thing. Some of the most successful content creators I know strike that balance extremely well, bringing in hype and gimmicks when the time is right, but also having a solid base in content that brings out the diehards day after day.

Just my thoughts, probably mostly wrong :P