One click search on Etsy for “Twitch Emotes” will yield 59,000 results. Hold up Austin wouldn’t you say that is a bit saturated for a side hustle? Well if you wanted to sell the basic memes pack like Chris Pratt from Parks and Recreation making a surprised face you are not going to gain traction.
Let’s peel back the layers on this niche onion and see how some other sellers are gaining a foothold in this saturated field. I came across a prominent feature in many of the top sellers where the images were available in 112 x 112 pixels, 56 x 56 pixels, and 28 x 28 pixels which is the three sizes needed by discord to process the image. By providing all three you save the streamer work of having to resize a 112 x 112 pixel image to two other sizes. I noticed GIF images tended to have better sales as opposed to PNG files. Some people added discord and youtube as keywords to get similar buyers who may be using the same type of “emote” file but for a different audience. Let’s be honest this is the bare minimum to even be in the running. Streamers want to stream. They don’t want to be doing the behind scenes work so the easier you make it for them the better.
So where did people further diversify from here? They did emotes for specific games. For instance “Twitch Emotes CSGO” (CSGO is one of most played first person shooters in the world) only yields about 1100 results of which only 8 were actually relevant to the keywords. I’m not trying to blow up the spot of people making money for CSGO streamers what I am trying to get at is you don’t need much to further differentiate yourself just “Twitch, Youtube, Discord Emotes [Game]”. Don’t play any games? There are tons of free to play games you can download for free to get inspiration or you can browse a subreddit for a specific game you want to target and see what people are talking about there for inspiration of an emote.
Another niche I noticed was doing different skin colors in different animation styles for the streamer themselves like this chibi animation below selling for $20. I don’t recommend offering custom emotes in this category as that equates to low pay work. I saw some sellers offering customs with 8 avatars in 3 sizes for $8 before selling fees, which granted I don’t know how fast they can work, but that seems like a below minimum wage job to me.
The idea is to have a clean product (notice the good transparency above) which is not custom but infinitely resellable as it will meet a large swath of people’s needs. I chose a sample one to do for a game I waste my limited free time with a Lochness monster you can find in Apex Legends. I think it turned out pretty good. I’ll update you guys if I make more than a few dollars.
