Easy-Mode Content

After wrapping up my stage the night before, I did a quick cleanup, had a short talk with the writer about the work we still had in progress, and went straight to bed.

There were still plenty of contestants scheduled after me, but that was none of my business. I already had a rough idea of who would pass anyway. What mattered more was getting enough sleep throughout the audition so I could keep my condition locked in.

I wasn't being careful for no reason. Back before the regression, during the original Wooga-dol audition, more ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠than a few people had pushed themselves too hard — wrecked their throats, come down with full-body aches, completely failed at managing their health. I was never going to walk that same path.

Today's Group B's turn.

In every real sense, this was the day the true star of the Wooga-dol first round would take the stage. My performance yesterday had generated plenty of buzz, and personally I was satisfied with it — but I still couldn't touch the other person's fortress. As someone who had only just started streaming, I was up against a towering story I simply could not surpass.

That one's a once-in-a-lifetime natural disaster. Cleanly give it up and think about the next step.

The notice hadn't gone up yet, but the road from the end of Round 1 to Round 2 was going to be brutal. First there would be individual interviews with the passers, hosted alongside Ssa-yo, and after that the team assignments for the Round 2 group mission. The Round 2 mission itself was already set for Sunday the 23rd — meaning all of this had to happen inside roughly a week.

Team assignments were on the 20th, right? And if they have to announce on the 23rd, that means the actual prep time is only two days, tops.

Just like Round 1, Round 2's preparation window was painfully tight. You could wonder why everything had to move this fast, but on internet broadcasts — where people craved stimulation and instant reactions — there was no other way. The second content started dragging, viewers would lose patience and go hunting for their next hit of dopamine somewhere else.

For the same reason, the schedules for Rounds 3 and 4 were already locked into the same week-by-week sprint.

Among people with glittering talent, the only way I can stand out is effort and time. Don't forget that. Do it right.

As a regressor, I had the cheat key of knowing the future. That was why I had started preparing for the Wooga-dol audition two months early. What felt crushingly tight to the other contestants still left me with a little breathing room. And that was exactly why I had to do even better. Other people had a week to solve something I had already been sitting with for three.

"And today's stream has to go well too."

October 16th, Sunday. The day of the Wooga-dol Group B stages. Yesterday I had shown off my charm up on stage; today it was time to show it on stream.

I feel a little bad for Ssa-yo, but…

We were a mutual-benefit relationship anyway, weren't we? I boldly chose a 2 p.m. start. Stream title: Seo Seung-cheol's Cold Gaze. Perfect bait for all the virtual-streamer fans wandering around with nowhere to go until four o'clock.

In three years of watching internet broadcasts, I had learned one hard truth: the word "tone-deaf" did not exist for nothing. You saw it clearest in content choices.

The long history of streaming was full of content you could reference — endless amounts of it. Analyze that history and you could roughly predict how viewers would respond. And yet, whether from sheer stupidity or from a laziness so deep that even that much effort felt like a waste, streamers kept repeating the same tone-deaf moves. It was enough to make you want to tear your hair out.

Take, for example, a virtual streamer who suddenly decided to pull out go, mahjong, or chess. What, were they Lee Sedol? Kaiji from the gambling apocalypse? How did anyone look at that and think, yeah, this is stream content?

You could find the same disasters in games. Forcing through unpopular titles like Eternal Return or Valorant. Sometimes dragging over some mystery trash game they had somehow dug up on Steam and trying to force-feed it to their audience. Even their regulars would log in, leave the stream running, and go do something else out of pure horror — classic tone-deaf behavior.

If a streamer was just running a hobby broadcast for their own fun, fine. They wanted to enjoy themselves; whether it tanked was their problem. But when a full-time broadcaster did that, fans went past frustrated and straight into rotting from the inside.

Think I'm joking? Watch a bunch of no-name streamers get talked into spending a whole week doing late-night Part 2 energy mahjong, Shanghai, and Crazy Arcade as a group, and you will lose your mind.

Ugh. Just thinking about it still makes me want to throw hands.

I believe that if you are a full-time broadcaster, you at least cannot afford to slack on market research for internet streaming. You should know the likes and dislikes of the people you can call your "customers." You also should not turn your back on a game just because you personally hate the type or it is not your taste. You are an adult, not a child. Being allowed to refuse things you do not want to do is a privilege kids get. If there are too many things you cannot do and too many things you pick around, you should quit the job.

In that sense, I rate "professional consciousness" about work very highly. Setting personal likes and dislikes aside, treating it as a job, cranking the energy as high as it will go, and working to give the audience a good time…

You can find content that already blew up with just a little searching.

Thinking about the no-names who still had not figured that out made me feel stifled all over again. So today, I decided to demonstrate it myself.

How to stably snatch up both viewers and buzz. The name of the game: "ego-rewatch" content — the kind that lets you freeload an entire day's stream.

Ego-rewatch was a crude streaming term that mashed together "broadcast replay" and a vulgar word for self-pleasure. Put simply, it was the feeling of rewatching a stream that went well, basking in it, and enjoying yourself. YouTube was drowning in a similar genre — the so-called Korea-boosting content where you watched foreigners react to Korean things. Same family of content.

It feels like freeloading, and the name is cheap enough that people write it off easily, but after a big piece of content, honestly nothing beats it.

Ego-rewatch content was a traditional powerhouse — the comfort-food staple of the content world. Everyone had a need for recognition, and ego-rewatch was structured to poke that desire better than almost anything else.

From the very start, I kept feeding lines designed to satisfy exactly that craving.

"Watching this, I really feel all over again how incredible Ssa-yo is for putting a project like this together. The pressure on him must have been insane. Honestly, every virtual streamer on Pangea TV should at least send him a thank-you. When you think about how much this audition expanded the virtual ecosystem…"

Viewer count: 6,786. Since I was ego-rewatching Ssa-yo's content, most of them were from his fandom. How long had it been since I had hit a number like this? ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Building goodwill with Ssa-yo's fans while also raking in sweet Candy donations — once again, I could feel the greatness of an ego-rewatch stream.

There is one downside, though. Get too deep into ego-rewatch streams and you start attracting clueless people who show up every time there is big content and mindlessly demand you rewatch it for them.

No-name streamers with no audience could get swept along if that kind of pressure got loud enough — but that did not apply to me right now. How hard had I worked building a fixed viewer base for moments exactly like this? I could say with confidence that I had left that no-name tier behind.

"Ah! Finally, my stage. Whew, getting nervous."

I enjoyed Group A's audition together with the chat and gave them flavorful reactions the whole way. I was not a four-year veteran viewer for nothing. Watching each stage, I overdid the forced bias praise one moment and pulled a straight face the next, playing push and pull. Every so often a TMI wall-of-text pest would show up and grind my teeth down, but I powered through with the professional spirit I had been preaching earlier.

Alright, Seo-a, you took the money, right? So smile~

Laughing, talking, and having fun like that, four o'clock arrived before I knew it. The viewer count, slowly bleeding away, caught my eye. Ssa-yo had gone live for the Group B audition. I shut down the rewatch without missing a beat and hopped over to his stream to keep siphoning blood. With content this big, plenty of people ran the main broadcast and other people's reactions side by side on multi-view anyway.

If you want to survive, you have to know how to play it this shrewd.

In ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the wild jungle of internet broadcasting, talent alone would not keep you alive. Today, once again, I kept turning the gears in my head for the sake of survival.