What's up guys, it's Pete here again for the
Gaming Careers YouTube channel and today
we've got a guide on how to add follower
alerts, donation alerts and subscriber
alerts into OBS studio for your Twitch or
YouTube Gaming streams. The website or
service we're going to be using today is
called Streamlabs. Now it used to be called
Twitch Alerts, so if you've ever heard of
people saying that they use Twitch Alerts
to be able to notify of new followers and
things like that, it's the same company
they've rebranded and it's now called streamlabs.
But it's basically the number-one
tool in terms of the amount of users
using it, I think they state on their
website that the top 25,000 streamers
on Twitch and YouTube, 80% of
them are using streamlabs software to be
able to notify the views of new
followers or donations or subscribers, so
it's a really really popular tool and it's
very likely that your favorite streamers are
using it as well. What it actually allows you
to do is to completely customize the
look and feel of these alerts. So
basically when somebody subscribes or
starts following your stream, the streamlabs
software can notify OBS in a way of
this new follower and then the
notification can appear on stream for
the rest of your viewers and you can
completely customize how this alert
appears, so you can have a custom image,
custom sound, custom text, anyway you
really want to let your viewers know
that you've got a new follower or a new
subscriber a new donation you can
customize that with streamlabs. Now the
final thing to mention before we jump
into the software is that this video
will be fairly long because I want to cover it
in detail and really explain all the
options so that you can make the best
decision for your stream. But I will have
time stamps down in the description below
so if you want to skip ahead to a
certain section be sure to open up the
description and click ahead to the
certain parts of the video that you want
to see. And also if you're new here at the
Gaming Careers YouTube channel, we have
loads of videos like this helping you
set up your stream and basically grow your
gaming passion into a profession, so if
you're new here please do consider subscribing.
Let's jump into the software!
So the first thing we want to do is to head
straight over to the Streamlabs
website which is streamlabs.com and
we can connect our Twitch.tv or YouTube
Gaming account. So when you get to the website
click Launch Streamlabs and next we will
be choosing which platform we want to
connect to. So for this video I'm going to be using
Twitch but the process is exactly the
same for YouTube Gaming. Now, login with
your Twitch credentials and if it's the
first time that you've connected streamlabs to
Twitch, you'll also probably get a window
asking for you to authorize streamlabs
to access some minor details of your
Twitch account. Click authorize if you
are happy to allow this kind of
permission and we'll get taken to the
streamlabs dashboard. Now as you can see,
there are absolutely loads of features that
streamlabs offers and to prevent this
video from being two or three hours long,
I'll be splitting the main features into
separate videos. So for this video we're
going to be covering the alerts, so
follower alerts, subscriber alerts and donation alerts.
The other kind of features, things
like donation goals, chat boxes and
stream labels, we'll be covering those in
future videos. So to start adding and
customizing our alerts, we want to click
the alert box option down the left-hand side.
Next let's scroll down to where we see
the alert settings and you can see we
have separate tabs for follows,
subscriptions, donations, hosts and bits.
We'll start with follows so let's click that.
Now the first option is whether or not
you want to enable showing an alert on
your stream when a viewer clicks to
follow you. For new and smaller streamers,
enabling follow alert encourages viewers
to follow your stream and they also
notify you that someone has enjoyed what
they've been watching. When you get a new
follower please do interact with them,
say hello, ask them a question, you really want to
be building a community with all of
your followers and if somebody's taken
the time to click follow on your Twitch
page then you know that they've enjoyed what
they've been watching and you need to
start a interaction, a friendship with
them almost. So you might be asking why would
you ever want to disable follow alerts?
Well if you're a big streamer and who gets
new followers every single minute that
they're streaming, then having an alert
pop up on stream can be really quite
distracting both for you and for your
viewers, since it happens so often. So if you're
a big streamer, then you might consider
disabling this option. Since most of our
community here at the Gaming Careers YouTube
channel are learning to grow their
channels, I'm going to leave these enabled and move on.
The next option is the layout that you
want for your follower alert. The three
options here are: text below the image,
text on top of the image, or text to the
right of the image. You're not forced to
have an image in your alerts, so if you
don't want one we'll cover that later, but I
think it really helps with the viewers
engagement to have a funny gif or
something like that
appearing when you get a new follower.
Next we have alert animation and this
lets you customize how your alerts show
and hide when they trigger. So you can see
here there are lots of different options
for fading in, zooming in, bouncing in or
sliding in and also the exact same
options for when the alert has finished.
I'd recommend just setting anything
you like the look of for now, because
later we'll come back and play around
with these once we have a preview set up
within OBS so you can actually see what
these look like. Now the next option is a
fairly important one to understand and it's
called message templates. This is the
actual message that will show on stream
when somebody follows you. This squirely
bracket with name in the middle, that's a
token, effectively just a placeholder
which will get replaced by the username
of the person that's followed you.
So if their name was let's say Gaming
Careers, it would display:
"GamingCareers is now following!"
You can change this text to whatever you like, just make sure
you leave in the squirly brackets around
the word name, where you want streamlabs
to replace name with the username. I'm
going to leave mine at the default because I think
that looks fairly good.
Next we can setup the text animation and
there are some sample text to the right
just showing how the animation looks.
There's some pretty fun ones in here, so
something that you like the look off, for
me I'm going to choose "Tada". Next we
get to choose an image and sound that
play every time an alert is triggered.
Streamlines has a really decent size
selection of stock images and gifs, as
well as sounds that you can choose from,
or you can upload your own by dragging
and dropping. If you want your stream to
really stand out,
here's where you could spend some time
in Photoshop as well as like an audio
program like Audacity creating a
custom notification that really matches
your stream brand. But for the purposes of
this video, I'll just stick with the
default gif and the default sound.
Just as a quick note, if you don't want an
image or a sound every time you get a
new follower you can click the little
cross here to remove it.
Next we set the sound volume for the
alert sound, this can be anything between
0 and 100%, we can also add an
alert duration, so this is
the length that the alert will appear on
your stream for. I don't really recommend
setting this anywhere above eight
seconds as I've found 8 seconds is easily
enough time for viewers to see and read the
alert. And finally we can set the alert
text delay, so this is the number of
seconds delay for displaying the text
after your image and your audio show.
So if you want to wait a few seconds for the
animation to finish before the text shows,
you can set that up there. Next let's
expand the font settings section. In the
font box we can enter the name of the
Google font we wish to use for our alert.
So you can see a full list of these fonts
if you go to google.com/fonts and you're also
given a list of the top five most
commonly used fonts. Font size is just
the size of the font in pixels and font
weight is how thick or bold the font
appears, so feel free to play around with
these settings to get something that
really matches what you want. Now, text
color and text highlight color are the
two colors that are used on the text in
the alert. So as you might have guessed,
text color is the color of the base text
so that would be the "is now following!",
and text highlight color is the color of
the highlight text which is the name of
the follower. So you can enter the hex value
if you know it or you can click and
search for a color of your choice.
Finally, if you're quite comfortable with
the platform, you can add a variation to
this alert if you want to randomize the
messages or images or sounds, but for our example
we're done here so we can click save settings.
Now what we have done is we
have set up the followers alert in Streamlabs,
you can now set up similar or
completely different alerts for when a
user subscribes, donates, hosts or gives you bits.
Since we've already covered the
follower alert in a fair amount of
detail and some of the other tabs have
similar settings,
we're just going to skip ahead to
the settings which are different.
Subscriptions for people that aren't
aware, are for people that are partnered
with Twitch. It allows viewers to subscribe
to you getting some sub-only perks for $5,
and then you and Twitch will
split that $5. If you aren't
yet partnered with Twitch, I understand
it's probably something that you want to
get in the future but you might as well
leave this disabled, as viewers won't be
able to subscribe to you anyway. If you
are lucky enough to be partnered with Twitch,
you'll see that the initial settings can be set up
however you like,
very similarly to the follower alert that we
just covered. The only real differences
are these two boxes down here.
Resub Message Settings and Resub
Message Text-to-Speech. So the Resub
message setting allows you to show the
viewers Resub message as part of their
alert, this also includes Twitch emotes.
If you are going to enable this, I'd
advise increasing the alert duration
past eight seconds just so that you have
time to properly read the message and
your viewers do too. Now Resub message
text to speech, that will have a voice of
your choice read out the viewers
resub message. If you're going to enable
this then I would really recommend
turning the spam security to low or
medium, just to prevent the comment spam
of somebody commenting you know "vvvvvvv",
you don't want that being read out by
text-to-speech all the time.
The final thing that I would recommend
doing in the subscriber alert, is adding
a resub variation so that the message
is slightly different for people that
are re-subscribing to you every month.
To do this, we'll select add a variation. Name it
resub and change the variation condition
to "months subscribed to is at least" and
change the value to 2. Then you can play
around with your resub alert as much as
you'd like, the only thing I'll mention is
in the message template you can use the
keyword months surrounded by squirly
brackets and that will be replaced by the
number of months that the viewer has re-subbed for.
Make sure when you're done, you click Save Settings.
The last feature that we're
going to be setting up in streamlabs is
the donation alert. So this is for
whenever a user clicks on your
link and donates to you through Paypal or
some other services. Now before we go
into customizing what the alert will
look like, we first need to edit our
donation settings. Let add a donation
method, so for me I'm going to go with
Paypal and enter my paypal email.
Next let's choose a currency, this is just the
preferred currency format that you wish
to see in your alerts and around the
streamlabs dashboard. The donation
page currency is just the currency you
want your donation page to show. I'd
recommend leaving this on "detect automatically",
which will automatically
pick the currency that best suits the
donators geographical location. Next the
minimum amount is the minimum amount you
want your users to be able to donate and
the suggested amount is just the placeholder
amount on your donation page. So this is
a suggested amount for the donator, they
can obviously change it. I'll leave mine
at the defaults with a minimum of one
dollar and a suggestion of $5.
The preferred lingo option just
allows you to choose between using the
word donations or tips, so just choose
whichever you think is more natural for
you. And next you should be given a link
to your donation page, so this might not
work until you've finished and click
Save but it's effectively this will be
the page URL that you want to send your
viewers to if they want to donate. So it's
worth linking in your Twitch profile somehow.
Allow Pro Viewers, this is an option that
allows viewers to donate some money to
Streamlabs as well as donating to you.
They'll give them a few more options in
their donation message, as an incentive,
and it helps support streamlabs and keep it running.
There's absolutely no pressure to leave
this enabled at all, so disable it if you
want to but if you are enjoying using
streamlabs and you've found the service
helpful then it's a nice way to show
your support. The button color allows
you to change the color the donate
button on your donation page and
donation memo is a place to write a
brief message that will be shown on your
donation page, so saying your words of
thanks for the person that's donating.
Banner override, this allows you to set a URL
path to an image for a donation banner.
But if you just leave this blank it
automatically defaults to pulling your
Twitch.tv channel banner anyway so I'm
just going to leave it blank.
Finally, profanity filter this allows you to set
a specific filter to prevent swear words
from being included in people donation
messages. They can even automatically be
replaced with happy words, although this
doesn't obviously always read perfectly.
You can also add custom bad words into a
box below, so if you find people
donating and they've found a loophole in
the the bad words filter and they keep
donating using a certain phrase that you
don't want appearing on your stream all the
time then you can add the custom words
in this box below. When you're happy click save
settings and then we can go back to the
alert box and across to the donations tab.
So most of these settings you've seen
before and you should know how to
customize, so I won't bother going
through them but some of the new
settings worth mentioning are the
minimum donation amount to alert, and the
minimum donation amount to read with
text-to-speech. So here you can set the
minimum donation amounts required for
the donation to be shown as an alert, and
also the minimum amount for the donation
to be read as text-to-speech. So this is
useful if you're getting spammed with
lots of small donations just to abuse
the text-to-speech bot. In the message
template you can use the amount word
surrounded by squirly brackets to show the
amount donated in your message.
As with the other tabs you can also add custom
variations for certain donation amounts
if you'd like to.
But that will do it for me so I'll click
save settings and now we'll look at getting
these messages into OBS studio.
Now if we go back to the top of the alert box page,
you'll see a number of checkboxes and a
lock to show the widget URL. To start, make
sure that all the checkboxes that you
want alerts for are checked and then
click the show widget URL link.
This gives you a unique URL that we'll be
using in OBS studio, so copy the link and
then let's open up OBS Studio.
So in OBS let's select the
scene that we want to add our alerts
into and then click the + icon in
sources and select to add a browser source.
I'd recommend naming it something
you're going to remember, so for me I'm
going to put streamlabs alerts and
in the new window that pops up you want
to be pasting the URL into the URL box.
You can change the width and height if
you wish to but this can be changed
later by dragging it around. And you can also
set the FPS, I'd recommend setting it to
the same FPS that you stream at to avoid
any kind of flicker issues and the CSS
that can be left at its default unless you
really know what you're doing.
You shouldn't need to enable either of
the bottom checkmarks, so let's just press OK.
Now you shouldn't see anything really at
the moment other than a blank box with
the red border around that you can drag,
move around and resize. One thing to make
sure you've done is to make sure that
this is on top of all your other sources
so that you'll get alerts on top of
your game, and on top of your webcam.
I'm going to drag mine into the middle and
sort of top area of my stream and now it's
time to test some of the alerts. So head
back to the streamlabs page and let's
click test follower alert, and then
quickly alt-tab back into OBS, so we can
see our new follower alert showing up.
I'm just going to reposition and resize mine a little bit, make it
a bit more central and a little bit
smaller and then I'll test a subscriber alert.
Now that we've got all of our
alerts showing up in OBS it's time to
customize it properly, so go back to the
streamlabs website go back to be settings
that we were playing with before and
have a play around, change the animation,
change the text type, change the sizes, change
the colors and just get something that
you think is really unique and fun
looking for your stream. Make sure that
you're saving every setting that you change,
if you want to see it in the preview
and then test it again just by clicking
that test follower alert button. A final thing
to mention is that when you actually are
streaming, I find it useful to have the
streamlabs dashboard page open possibly
on a second monitor, because this will
allow you to see all the alerts that are
appearing on your stream without having to
alt-tab and then you can read messages
from your followers or subscribers and
also see the donation amount.
I hope you guys found this video helpful, and if
you have got to this point in the video
please could you give me a thumbs up on
the video just to let me know that it
did help you out and we can aim to
create more videos around OBS Studio in
the future. Also if you're new to the
Gaming Careers YouTube channel we've got
quite a collection of videos now, we've
certainly got quite a few OBS Studio,
so if you're having any trouble with
your settings or adding sources or if
you want to learn how to do something
like adding a music scroller to your
stream, check out the GamingCareers YouTube
channel and subscribe if that's kind of
thing that you enjoy watching.
Subscribers! I'll see you in the next video, peace!