Getty Images/luza studios
- The “study with me” trend on Twitch has grown rapidly over the last few months.
- Streamers study live for thousands of viewers, with breaks every hour to chat with followers.
- Most are young women, medical students, but there’s a big community supporting each other.
At 5 p.m. on any given weekday, Belén will be wearing her headphones, studying in silence with nothing but the sound of rain in the background.
Meanwhile, thousands of people will be watching her live on streaming platform Twitch.
In the right corner of the screen, there’s a stopwatch with a countdown timer.
As soon as it reaches zero, an alarm sounds.
The young student stops what she’s doing, connects the microphone, looks at the camera, and addresses the audience: “How are you? Thank you very much for that new sub, how’s the study going?”
This is a typical day in the life of Belén, better known as @Thewintergallery on Twitch where she has over 6,000 followers.
Belén, 21, studies medicine. She’s currently in her fifth year and has been broadcasting her study sessions live for a year now.
By using Twitch, she’s earned just over $280. With the income, she’s bought a computer to improve her streams — one follower even made a donation that helped her buy a new microphone.
However, she’s not on Twitch for the money.
“The best thing is the people, the community that’s been created. I’ve made a lot of friends, even from Mexico, Argentina, and Costa Rica. We study together and take breaks together to talk about ourselves,” she explained.
When the pandemic began, libraries closed and everyone was stuck at home. What started in the pandemic as a way for many young people to keep in touch and study together, has transformed into a trend called study with me.
The students are mostly women studying medicine
Many content creators — the vast majority of streamers doing study with me are women — study live in front of thousands of people and follow the Pomodoro method. This method consists of interspersing one-hour study sessions with short 15-minute breaks.
Ana Blanca (@anablanchu) also livestreams her study sessions. She’s a fifth-year medical student and has over 46,000 followers on Twitch, over 82,000 on YouTube, and over 85,000 on TikTok. In her best months, she can earn anywhere between $1,100 and $1,700.
“I’ve never liked going to the library, I’ve always preferred to study at home. This is a way to do it while having company. And even though I’m studying, this is a job that takes a long, long time,” she said.
Blanca got the idea from a youtuber in the US, and she decided to try it out in Spain in 2019. She studies live on Twitch, where she’s followed by a mixture of students and other content creators. All of them are strangers to her.
“I don’t feel weird with strangers watching me. Since I’m at home, I’m very comfortable. In fact, we’ve had as many as 4,000 people online studying on a live feed at once,” she said.
“At first, when I was thinking about it, I did say: it’s a bit shady, isn’t it? To think that there’s someone there, unknown to you, watching you while you’re studying. But, in reality, people are more into their own thing and have you in the background,” says Belén.
“In the live shows we talk about everything, but mostly about study topics. How the exams are going, we share tricks to get organized, or doubts people have about the baccalaureate or the career,” said Ángela (@AngelaWS), another 23-year-old content creator, who’s also studying medicine.
Ángela has just over 7,000 followers on Twitch and over 37,000 on YouTube, although she said she doesn’t use that as much now. She prefers not to talk about how much money she makes, although she did admit that she doesn’t “make enough money for luxuries, but it’s okay.”
They all agree that the best thing about this experience is the community that’s created. In their live broadcasts there’s a healthy atmosphere, they share advice, experiences, motivate and help each other, and support each other with their studies.
“I receive a lot of messages telling me: ‘Angela, thank you so much, you’ve helped me motivate myself, or I’ve improved my grades lately, or I got a 9 in the exam I studied with you. It’s a way of influencing people but in a positive way,” she said.
“Twitch’s algorithm gives you much more visibility”
The three young women have been on Twitch for several months. Although both Ángela and Ana Blanca began by uploading videos to YouTube, the Twitch boom made them make the leap to the platform owned by Amazon.
“Right now I see more possibilities for Twitch than YouTube, plus being live you save the whole part of editing, recording, and production that took a lot of time,” said Angela.
“YouTube and Twitch are different things. Twitch is more like something to do at home. It saves me a lot of time and I get to study with people. It takes a lot of work away from me and the truth is that I have a great time,” said Ana Blanca.
“Twitch’s algorithm gives you much more visibility,” added Belén.
In recent months, there have been many content creators who have decided to leave YouTube for Twitch, attracted by its popularity and the better economic conditions it offers.
People studying for professional exams are also taking part
In addition to young university or high school students, many others have decided to take the leap to the live video platform and share their study sessions.
Lorena (@piradita_study), a 24-year-old from Barcelona, is a psychologist and is currently preparing for the Resident Internal Psychologist (PIR) exams. She started on Twitch in January of last year because she wasn’t feeling motivated, and she now has over 7,000 followers.
“The exam process is a very lonely road,” she said.
“On Twitch people study with you, not with a video of you like what you might find on YouTube,” she explained. “The cool thing is that we’re all doing something together, at the same time, and then we talk and share our stuff.”
Lorena said that, little by little, the profile of the people joining her community is changing. They aren’t just teenagers playing video games, “more and more older people are joining; in my chat there are people in their 30s and 40s.”
And, as in any job, sometimes she also feels the pressure to meet expectations or days when she has to force herself to get in front of the camera.
“Whoever says they don’t feel some pressure is lying. We all have bad days and of course there’s that pressure. Even more so when there are people who are paying to see your content,” she added.
All the creators question why, if there are specific sections on Twitch like Just chatting or ones specific to video games, there’s no section for study with me.
Lorena added that the platform should start filtering certain users better.
“There are still people who, just because I’m a girl, come on my live shows to attack me or tell me really stupid things.”
“For people who aren’t very used to content creators like this, they should know that not all of us are guys who sit 12 hours in front of the computer to play video games, which is also totally fine, or that we live in Andorra. There are others of us who dedicate ourselves, in a certain way, to helping others,” said Ana Blanca.
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