How do you choose who to collaborate with?

For me it has to be a creator that has the similar personality, they have to click with me and my viewers. We can play games together, but if there is no chemistry with us or spark that makes people want to watch then its detimental.

I want collaborations with creators that want to have fun on stream and dont take life too seriously just for a couple of hours

One thing you need to think about when you are choosing someone to collaborate with is what is your end goal, are you doing this to grow your own content or are you doing it just for fun. If you were trying to grow your own audience it would also have to make sense so collaborating with someone who has a similar content as you, this wouldn't matter as much if you are just doing it for fun.

When choosing someone to collaborate with the more the you are able to connect the better result you might get.

Personally for me I only collaborate with people just for fun, we just do it for a laugh and I am actually part of a small stream team that have similar goals so we sometimes make content and stream together. I also know plenty of streamers in several communities so when I collaborate with someone I usually know them quite well beforehand.

For me I will look at a few main things which are -

Chemistry, so I will usually have watched a fair bit of their content to see if I like them and if i think we would get on well during a stream / video

This also filters into the next point of making sure it would be someone it would be fun to collaborate with, otherwise whats the point, you wouldn't like it and it would shine through in the content.

Then time zones, I have a few creator friends that it would be cool to collaborate with on stream but they are in totally different time zones so it doesn't work.

I do not care about their audience size, only that it is in the same / similar niche and demographic eg gaming and audience who like whatever the game genre was.

These points are also important is you are effectively screening them as you do not want to stream with some random who you know nothing about and may be a nightmare on stream / detrimental to your brand etc

When I want to invite someone to collaborate on content creation, here’s what I do:

1. What kind of content do they create? I need to check if their content aligns with mine, because if the content doesn't relate, it will be hard to set the direction of the collaboration. I prefer to work with someone whose theme matches mine.

2. Evaluate the content creator’s personality. This is to ensure that their personality meshes well with mine for a harmonious collaboration.

3. Assess their reputation with their audience. This matters because it can significantly impact my own content’s audience.

The truth is, I have only done this once and I nearly lost my YouTube channel over it. I teamed with another creator who then decided he wasn't going to work with us anymore and levelled a ton of copyright strikes against us. We very nearly lost our channel.

Since then I have been super wary of teaming up with anyone outside of my actual IRL friends team, but this being said, I am working with another Minecraft YouTuber at this point.

Why this guy? Essentially he is like me, struggling to break into the Minecraft scene, it's a hard place to go to, so we started talking and we came up with a workable idea, but, we hashed it out first, if they started making money, how would we split it, how would the videos be presented etc.

I think with collaboration, you have to find someone who wants what you want but not for their own gains but for a project gain, a mutual "we can do this, together, on a server, with both our work". It really is important.

So I would say, we as creators need to make sure of the above as a reason as to why we collaborate, so that a mutual goal is reached, not a project that only benefits one party.