Why Do I Use Superchats In My Shows?

Hey guys. If you’ve been around my shows for a while you’ve noticed that I use Superchats (YouTube’s way of allowing viewers to contribute to a show in order to have a highlighted comment) to take my live questions (The John Campea Show’s main topics come from people sending in topics and questions for free using he form at www.thejohncampeashow.com/contact every day).

So naturally, I’ve had people ask me over the last year or so “why do you use Superchats”? Or more aggressively “Why do you make people pay to ask a question?” I’ve had a few people ask that question again this week so I thought I’d make a post to lay out the reasons so I can just point people to this whenever I get asked again. I’m very efficient that way šŸ™‚

Ok, first of all let’s be clear. YOU DO NOT NEED TO PAY ANYTHING TO SEND IN A QUESTION TO THE JOHN CAMPEA SHOW. As I mentioned above, ALL of our main topics come directly from you guys sending in topics or questions at www.thejohncampeashow.com/contact every single day that no one has to pay for. I’ve always done it that way, I always will. Of course the catch is that I get about 100-150 message sent in to me every single day and I can only take 5 of them. So there’s no guarantee your topic will get picked… but that’s been the case ever since the AMC Movie Talk days.

But if you think getting in 100 messages per day is bad, that’s NOTHING compared to how many questions would get sent in during the live questions part of my shows back at the last place I worked. We would take live questions via twitter and the messages would FLY by faster than even Superman could read them. I don’t think I’d be exaggerating to suggest that 400-600 tweets would come flying in on any given show… and obviously we only had time to take a handful of them.

The problem that created was that eventually, some people started getting straight up ANGRY that their questions never got picked. They took it personally. I would get multiple emails every week from viewers swearing at me, calling me names and insisting they were never watching my show again because they thought I was specifically targeting them to leave their questions out. Obviously, the reality wasn’t anything like that… there were just too many questions coming in and their odds of getting theirs picked was very small, like everyone else.

The other thing is a lot of troll and BS stuff got shot in too, so we’d have to wade through all that (while 100s of messages flew by) in an attempt to find legit questions to take.

So to sum up, the problems with taking live questions from twitter were:
– Far too many got sent in to track
– Many people never got their questions picked despite sending in every day
– Some viewers got angry and took it as a personal attack that their questions didn’t get picked
– Some toxic stuff would get thrown in there every day, often offensive to my female staff
– I couldn’t sift through all the tweets to find questions and needed a dedicated person to do it
– and several other things.

So not long after I went solo and started up The John Campea Show, YouTube introduced Superchats. I only found out about it because suddenly a few popped up on my stream while I was doing a show and I had no idea what it was at first. OBVIOUSLY if someone contributed to the show I wanted to make answering their question a priority. So I did. Then suddenly more people started sending them in. Then more. Then more. So I started taking all the Superchat questions first, then picking out some other ones in the regular chat board. However, we got to the point where more Superchats came in than we had time to answer on the show, so there wasn’t any time to get to non-Superchat questions anyway. So yeah, before you knew it, the live questions part of the show became all Superchat questions.

As it turns out, Superchats solved a LOT of problems and actually created a few really helpful mechanisms in the show for both me and my audience

Why Superchats Are A Win-Win-Win
– Superchats are a tremendous source of support for the channel. They’ve helped me not only support myself and the show, but also to pay people like Ray, Jonathan, Rob and Ashley. Yay!
– A Superchat guarantees a viewer’s question will get answered in a video. So if someone has something they really want addressed or talked about, there is now a mechanism for them to make sure it gets addressed. It was never like that before when they’d have like a 1 out of 50 chance of having it answered.
– It gives a viewer an instant and quick way to support the channel if they enjoy it. I’ve learned people really do like to support the things they enjoy, and this gives them an easy and practical way to do so.
– It limits the number of questions that come in during live chats
– It almost 100% eliminates trolls from the live parts because trolls are cheap šŸ™‚ And hey, if someone wants to pay me $5 just to call me an ass… then fine, I’ll take it.
– People tend to put a bit more thought into a question or comment when they’re contributing to do so which gives us better content.

So there you have it. In a nutshell, that’s BASICALLY why I use Superchats. The benefits are huge for me, for my channel and for my viewers. It solves several problems I used to have (I’ve never gotten a single hate email from people complaining their questions don’t get answered since I started using Superchats) and it created opportunities for my viewers that I was never able to offer before.

Are Superchats or the Superchat system perfect? No. But they’ve been a real blessing to me, to my channel and ultimately I believe to my viewers. Thanks for reading.

5 Comments on “Why Do I Use Superchats In My Shows?”

    1. 1. Watch the live show
      2. Get to live chat
      3. check the comment box.
      4. Under the line to type it says “say something”
      5. below that is a “$” sign
      6. Click the “$” and you can use superchat

  1. “some people started getting straight up ANGRY that their questions never got picked. They took it personally. I would get multiple emails every week from viewers swearing at me, calling me names and insisting they were never watching my show again because they thought I was specifically targeting them to leave their questions out. ” Shamefully, i was one of em. Glad superchats exist now! Great article!

  2. You liked to get paid for your hard work and dedication to make a great show? How inconsiderate!šŸ˜‚. I’m new to your show but I’m absolutely loving it. I identify with your rationale on most topics and it’s been an great experience so far.

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