[Featured Creator] 👀 Meet Kyle, a streamer who's monetized his passion for Super Smash Bros Ultimate.

His amazing move got him featured on a major streaming page.

✨Creator Profile

You may know Kyle Cardone ‘22 as the Streaming Creative Lead for Cornell Creatives. But when he’s not helping peer creators connect with the streaming community or sharing advice on how to get started, he’s been building a following of his own on the popular streaming platform, Twitch. For Kyle, Twitch has even become a way to monetize his creative passion.

This spring, Kyle was featured on YEET Smash, a YouTube channel that shares users’ streaming highlights from the game Super Smash Bros Ultimate. The platform gets thousands of submissions to be featured every day, and reaches a following of over 200k subscribers.

Within the Cornell community, Kyle is studying Hospitality Management and minoring in Leadership, and he remains an outlet for other students who want to start streaming, podcasting, or sharing other content on Twitch. He’s served as the source of information and insight for several students on campus and strongly encourages peers to launch a new creative project!

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🎮Streaming

Q: Could you describe what you stream, and how you share and monetize your content?  

The game I stream is Super Smash Bros Ultimate, and I stream on Twitch. Initially, Twitch allows you to simply get “follows” from other users. You can’t make any money until you hit “Affiliate” status. This requires that you reach thresholds of average concurrent viewership, follower count, hours streamed, and amount of unique days in the month that you’ve streamed.   

Now I can actually make a little bit of money. Although it isn’t much, I’ve made almost $100 on the platform. If I continue to grow my channel, that number will become more substantial. My ideology is that I love the game and interacting with and entertaining people; if I’m going to be doing both anyways and spending hours of my time doing so, I might as well find a way to monetize it. 

Interested in seeing Kyle’s streaming work? Watch this brief video, which Kyle uses as the introduction video to his Twitch channel, Big_Nibble.

Q: This year, you were featured on a major streaming page on YouTube. Could you explain what you did to get featured? 

For those who aren't super familiar with the game, I'll avoid technical terms. After taking the opponents second to last stock (which means a “life” in the game), I dropped a projectile where I thought my opponent would go, and threw out a spike that would only connect if the projectile did as well. Because the set-up worked, I was able to take the last stock within 5 seconds, where it typically takes anywhere between 2 and 4 minutes to do so. 

It was a little bit of luck, and I guess the right person at YEET Smash saw it.

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💡Creative Journey

Q: To all the aspiring student creatives reading this, what would you like to say? Do you have any advice or tips to share? 

When you’re looking to start streaming, the first question on your mind is, “What equipment do I want, need, and what is absolutely integral?” If you look online, you’re bound to drop hundreds of dollars on something that is either unnecessary, or that you’re unsure about. But if you talk to someone with streaming experience, they’ll help and advise you. In reality, you don’t need hundreds of dollars to start.

Q: Is there anything else you’d like to share about your creative journey and goals?

Streaming can be really intimidating, and it’s something that I wanted to do personally for probably a year and a half or two years. 

Once I buckled down and got the equipment, my goal from the start was to make a little money. Now I am technically doing that. It’s a really cool thing that in a few months you can monetize a passion. I burnt every cent of my birthday money because I thought streaming was something I would enjoy. Now I'm really happy I did. 

I just want to encourage people who have something in the back of their head that they really want to try: find a way to start, start, and see where it goes. The worst that could happen is that it isn’t everything you thought it was, and then you can focus your energy elsewhere.

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Do you know the next featured creator? 👀 We want you to share Cornell Creatives with all your creative friends - whether they design, code, make music, edit videos, or channel their creativity in another way! 

Our creative space is too hype for creatives at Cornell to miss it, and the best part is: every creator is welcome.  

Let them know that you’ve got the best seat in the house for all things creative at Cornell University, and we hope one day they’ll be the star of the show. 🤩

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