Real Career Stories: Content Creator

real-career-stories-content-creator

[[p]]Ever wonder how someone goes from a corporate job to becoming a full-time content creator? On [[a href="https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/resources/podcasts" target="_blank"]]the DMI podcast[[/a]], we speak to digital professionals with unexpected, inspiring career stories.[[/p]]

[[p]]Ben Kaluza started his career in advertising operations, working behind the scenes at companies like Twitch. But a desire for creativity, ownership, and independence sparked a shift. From streaming Call of Duty to building a thriving TikTok audience through OBS tutorials and creator tips, Ben shares his unique journey from ad ops to becoming a trusted voice in the streaming and content creation space.[[/p]]

[[p]][[a href="https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/resources/videos" target="_blank"]]Watch more career stories.[[/a]][[/p]]

[[p]]Will Francis (00:00)[[br /]]
I&#39;m curious why, like what is it in you that makes you want to put stuff online?[[/p]]

[[p]]Ben Kaluza (00:07)[[br /]]
You know, it kind of stemmed from starting in corporate after I finished university. And I honestly just within the first week, I just was like, this is not for me. I come from an operations background. So advertising operations, there&#39;s very little creativity in advertising operations. I mean, you can stretch a bit and say there&#39;s creativity in designing and creating efficient operations, but no, not really.[[/p]]

[[p]]My day job ended up me being like doing fairly mundane, repetitive tasks as operations is. I felt there was no exploration. There&#39;s no opportunity to explore like creativity in some sense. And I had been, I would say not the most creative person at school, but I like, you know, being creative. I think everybody does to some degree. And then, I just started creating content because I just felt like it was a bit of escapism, I think, you know, just to own something as well. You know, when you start a corporate job, I felt like now I&#39;m working 40 hours a week for somebody else. I just then had this idea and ambition of, you know, working for myself...&#8275; I wanted to start a business, but I was like, okay, I was&nbsp;looking at SEO at the time, website building, sort of different digital marketing channels alongside my advertising job. And then I think content creation was just one of those things, social media, one of the things that I was going to try. And that&#39;s kind of what got me started.[[/p]]

[[p]]Will Francis (01:40)[[br /]]
Take me back there, that&#39;s interesting. So you were in ad ops, which like you say, it&#39;s the trafficking of ads. You&#39;re the people within somewhere like Twitch, right? Where you are responsible for actually getting this stuff live, the logistical side of that, right?[[/p]]

[[p]]Ben Kaluza (01:43)[[br /]]
Ad ops, yes, in ad ops.&nbsp;Yes. So, so my first job out of university was in display. I was display advertising, for a private healthcare website, gated community where, um, uh, pharma companies could advertise their drugs to UK physicians because it was on a, on a gated website. And I was responsible for putting the display like at the top, on the side, and essentially managing&nbsp;like the back end of that in Google Ad Manager. And then I transitioned to Twitch after about a year and a half. I got very fortunate in my first job in that I got given a lot of responsibility very quickly. The ad ops was outsourced, I started, and then they insourced it to me after a year. And I got a big responsibility on my lap, which allowed me to get the job at Twitch because the Twitch job required more experience than I had, but because I was basically managing ad ops for this company. after I mean, I didn&#39;t really know what I was doing to some I was figuring out I went along with they were happy for me to figure out as I went along rather than paying the agency an extortionate fee to not really do a great job. And that&#39;s just kind of, yeah, what stumbled me into Twitch, which was then more video ad focused. So you&#39;re right, managing the backend, not much programmatic, more direct, more like Brand give us the assets.[[/p]]

[[p]]Here&#39;s the target audience, here&#39;s the demo, game we want. I&#39;m the one that, you know, filling in the dropdowns in, you know, the dates and that, and then schedule go live. Pretty boring.[[/p]]

[[p]]Will Francis (03:25)[[br /]]
It is, but I worked sort near the ad ops people at a similar place to Twitch, a website called MySpace, where I worked for years in the noughties. I always thought that there&#39;s something interesting, something that I&#39;ve found fascinating about the ad ops people and what they did. And I thought, yeah, okay, are just, yeah, you&#39;re pushing buttons and getting this stuff live, but he must give you real... some deep insight there into what brands will pay money for, what brands get for that money. You see the results of that. Like what did it make you think about display advertising just out of interest?[[/p]]

[[p]]Ben Kaluza (04:02)[[br /]]
Yeah, people paying a lot money. Well, on the healthcare website, people paying &pound;50, &pound;60, &pound;70 CPM, cost per 1000, impressions on the display because they couldn&#39;t advertise to doctors anywhere else. Twitch also very premium as well, CPM, because at the time Twitch, this is sort of COVID, pre-COVID, during COVID, Twitch was booming and as a place to advertise to the younger audience,[[/p]]

[[p]]Twitch was the place. TikTok wasn&#39;t quite established at that time with its advertising products. And TikTok now is because TikTok targeting is fantastic and their ad ecosystem is a lot more developed than it was three, four, five years ago. But Twitch was the only place that you could really go after this young Gen Z-and-below audience, because they&#39;re all on Twitch. They&#39;re all on Twitch. And yeah, it just kind of opened my eyes up&nbsp;to that a little bit and the sort of, I actually thought Twitch are gonna be, as I left, I&#39;m like, you guys are gonna be in trouble. You don&#39;t develop out your ad products, you don&#39;t become more competitive. TikTok can take most of the market when it comes to brands wanting to advertise to people and Meta to some degree because it&#39;s a lot cheaper and the targeting&#39;s better.[[/p]]

[[p]]Will Francis (05:12)[[br /]]
Yeah, no, absolutely. Do you think it was being at Twitch and seeing a lot of streamers and people building businesses on essentially doing the things they loved and creating content about it? I mean, did that influence you a bit?[[/p]]

[[p]]Ben Kaluza (05:25)[[br /]]
Yeah, because I started streaming as I was at Twitch. I&#39;d started creating content before I joined Twitch within fitness and personal development, productivity, Ali Abdaal style, sharing my note taking systems, you know, nothing too exciting. And then was already gaming. I started streaming on Twitch about four or five months into my job. They were very much like, yeah, do it. Like they obviously they want their employees to stream. They want themself to immerse themselves in what the business is.[[/p]]

[[p]]It sounds really bad, but I could access any streamers&#39; dashboard. Like I could see that I could see their YouTube studio data. Let&#39;s just say I could see how much they made and stuff. And it wasn&#39;t until then when I started to realize how much streamers made because it was never really discussed and and it varies different than other platforms. And it wasn&#39;t so much&nbsp;the big guys and girls that I was kind of more curious about. I mean, I was curious about them. And I&#39;m more curious about the smaller people, how much of the smaller people were making and you would see people who would average 50 to 100 CCV. So 50 to 100 people watching like at a time on average over the duration of the stream. 50 to 100 doesn&#39;t sound like a lot because everybody&#39;s used the follower count or views on Reels or TikToks in the hundreds of thousands. 50 to 100, that&#39;s not a lot.[[/p]]

[[p]]But these people were earning five to 10 grand a month Not everybody, but across different game categories, popular ones, Call of Duty, FIFA, Minecraft, World of Warcraft, Roblox. And I was like, wow, how difficult could it be, you know, my naivety, But it essentially pushed me to go, actually, &nbsp;I game, I work at Twitch, like what&#39;s there to lose?[[/p]]

[[p]]Will Francis (07:00)[[br /]]
Yeah, wow, that is an eye opener, isn&#39;t it? Those numbers are not what you&#39;d expect. So you saw that, right? What was the first kind of content you put up? And also, what was the first thing that kind of took off and got a big number?[[/p]]

[[p]]Ben Kaluza (07:17)[[br /]]
Well, I did it for four weeks and then I was like, okay, let me figure out how do I grow? And I quickly established that like Twitch as a platform doesn&#39;t have any like discoverability. Like there&#39;s no feed, there&#39;s no video feed like TikTok, Reels, YouTube, homepage. It&#39;s very much favored towards people at the top. They&#39;re the ones that get seen first, they&#39;re the ones that get clicked on. And I realized you need a funnel.[[/p]]

[[p]]And then TikTok is the funnel here. TikTok at the time, three, four years ago was an amazing funnel and they had just recently launched TikTok Live. This is very early stages of TikTok Live. And all of the Twitch streamers who were already set up as live streamers, lots of my gaming friends, you just multi-stream to TikTok and Twitch and then you use the TikTok Live to funnel people into Twitch&nbsp;as well as the videos, you just have a video and, people will be able to identify the cases. A Twitch streamer, probably got a Twitch channel, will go over. Still not easy to funnel people over, but that&#39;s the[[/p]]

[[p]]A guy called Devin Nash, who used to speak on the streamer economy quite a bit and the longevity of a stream. He says the average streamer is successful streaming three to five years, because you burn out from streaming. You inevitably run out of steam. This is what happened to me, and your audience just[[/p]]

[[p]]loses trust in you or just loses the desire to watch you as much anymore because maybe you change games or change. You evolve and you&#39;re some of your audience don&#39;t evolve with you and you have to be funneling people in and it&#39;s not like YouTube or TikTok where a video could be evergreen and you know, you you make a hundred videos on YouTube and actually some of them are being pumped out for years and years and years and that&#39;s building your audience.[[/p]]

[[p]]Will Francis (08:41)[[br /]]
Yeah.[[/p]]

[[p]]Ben Kaluza (08:58)[[br /]]
Twitch, you don&#39;t stream, you don&#39;t build an audience on Twitch. It&#39;s as simple as that. And that is the biggest problem that I identified. And I preach this to people all the time. People come into my TikTok Live and they say, I wanna start streaming. I say, please don&#39;t. I say, if you&#39;re desperate to stream and you just wanna have fun and you want a game, I say, do it, learn how to stream, learn how to edit, learn some skills there in itself, public speaking to some&nbsp;extent of like, you know, being in the moment speaking, it&#39;s a good skill set to have. I think it&#39;s helped me massively. But don&#39;t don&#39;t think that you&#39;re going to make it as a successful streamer and become the next Speed or KaiCenat and like the biggest or you know, Mr. Beast because you won&#39;t you they&#39;re the 1 % of the 1 % of the 1 % of the 1 % and unfortunately, we live in a world where you only see the people succeeding and you don&#39;t see the millions failing&nbsp;who are the true representation of reality.[[/p]]

[[p]]Will Francis (09:51)[[br /]]
True that. So you pivoted to creating content on TikTok, Instagram, this evergreen content, like you say, even if you have a week off, that content is still gathering many, many views and followers and engagement. When did that start to take off? And again, what was the kind of inflection point where you realized, this is a thing because a video did really well?[[/p]]

[[p]]Ben Kaluza (10:00)[[br /]]
Yeah.[[/p]]

[[p]]I stopped streaming gaming, took six months off, sort of a bit of reflecting of like, what do I, I fell more in love as I was stopped growing. I fell more in love with trying to figure out how to grow and analyzing other people and care why are they grow and why am I not growing? I think my content&#39;s all right. I then started a podcast. was like, you know what, actually let me just speak to people and ask, I&#39;d made a bit of a network&nbsp;being at Twitch and also as a streamer and I had, you know, some good, sizable people, a lot bigger than me. And I think they were more than happy to sit on my podcast and chat to me on the basis that, wouldn&#39;t mind having somebody at Twitch just there if they ever needed a favor from me. So I leveraged that to some extent. And yeah, I felt more interested in just being a voice of the ecosystem, having my experience, even though&nbsp;at Twitch, I was in Ad Operations. I very much made it my mission to meet a lot of people. I did a lot more than the typical employee, like exploring other areas of my job because the culture inside was very transparent. I could speak to anybody most of the time, quite high up. Like if I just showed interest, like I&#39;m really interested in what you&#39;re doing. I loved it, and I made use of that. And then I started posting my podcast on TikTok.[[/p]]

[[p]]Fresh new account. I&#39;d grown my Call of Duty account to 100,000 on TikTok and I just abandoned that. I just was like, I&#39;m just going to start again. So I started a fresh new account. This was called StreamStrat, essentially short for streaming strategy. it says on the tin, like basically talking to people on the podcast, understanding their strategy, understanding how they grow, why they grow, how they manage the stream, mental health, all sorts.[[/p]]

[[p]]And then podcast didn&#39;t start happening, working. I thought, well, if I&#39;m talking to people on podcast, maybe I could like relay some of the points, but in my own more structured content, where I&#39;m just sort of like taking bits that people have said, taking things that I already know and just being like, okay, you should do this. And then, and then I just started pivoting out towards like,&nbsp;I didn&#39;t want to, but I&#39;d seen people say this within the same space in that like the valuable content never gets any views and it&#39;s only when they like do tutorials on like setting, like how to set up your audio and stuff like that. &nbsp;OBS settings, OBS is the streaming platform that most people use, broadcasting platform. So I started doing OBS tutorials and of course the video started doing well. And then I was like, well, I&#39;m not having success giving opinion based content.[[/p]]

[[p]]So I was like, let me just do some education tutorial based content. And that&#39;s when I started to having seen a lot more success. And then I started venturing out into like finding OBS plugins, things, how, you know, you can get bubbles on your screen, really niche stuff like bells and whistles that people just wanted to make their stream look pretty.[[/p]]

[[p]]Will Francis (13:00)[[br /]]
It&#39;s interesting that isn&#39;t it? I find in general in content, in podcasts and everything, you can give people really high value information about like strategic that&#39;s quite hard to get your head around and quite hard to action. And people kind of go, yeah, yeah. But the minute you give people like really practical hands-on tips, like here&#39;s a cool plugin or here&#39;s a one, two, three little mini tutorial. People love that.[[/p]]

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