Kate Stark is a professional Twitch.tv Streamer and LRR contributor with both acting and editing. She is one of the people responsible for handling social networking during the Desert Bus event and has produced Video blog s for years 8 - 10. In LRR shorts, Kate is known for her work as the girl in the Yummie's Snack Cake commercials, as well as for playing many roles on very short notice. She started her work behind the scenes early in LRR's operations as a camera operator. Also known for her insight in Phailhaüs - 11. When Graham inquires as to whether she is eating Nutella right from the jar, she responds "Is there any other way?"

Thanks to the regular Desert Bus drivers' lack of concentration, she is one of a handful of people to drive the bus without crashing, after guest driving in 2008.

For Desert Bus for Hope 4, she auctioned off the right to name a kitten she intended to purchase, the winner choosing the name "Aristotle."

Kate Stark occasionally appears as an actor in sketches, Crapshots and LoadingReadyRun, and is also well known for appearances on Feed Dump. She became a full-time streamer on Twitch in 2016, becoming partnered later the same year. Kate is Graham's younger sister.

When Kate launched her first stream, she had 10 viewers, more than most streamers start with.

Before she started the stream, she had a handful of followers on YouTube who followed her over to Twitch (some of whom are still with her today). Kate doesn’t have any secret tricks to share when it comes to growing streams. In her case, consistency (and a lot of work in the background) paid off. But she was able to share how she knew when to quit her job for full-time streaming, and which activities seem to make the most difference in her success.

Initially, Kate said she didn’t know if streaming would be something she could do as more than a creative outlet.

But as her channel grew, she realized she could reduce how many shifts she worked at the bar proportional to her streaming income.

Whenever the stream earned enough repeatable income to replace a shift, she decreased her work hours and increased her streaming time.

That pattern continued until she made the jump to full-time streaming in September 2016, nine months after she started the stream and five months after starting a Patreon campaign.

Kate said, "Making the switch to full-time streaming was the best decision I ever made.

And a week after I made that decision, I went to Twitchcon in San diego for about four days. It was my first big streaming convention as a streamer and it just reaffirmed every decision I had made up until that point; that this is what I want to be doing and these are the people I want to be around. Since then, it's been work every single day, but I honestly wouldn't trade it for anything."

She loved getting to know other streamers at the convention.

Hearing their stories and learning about what their lives were like motivated her to do what she needed to do to keep fostering the relationship she had with her community.

For Kate, the anecdote to Twitch subscriptions’ variability has been Patreon.

"Patreon is the income I can count on.

There are still some variations month to month with people upping their pledge or deleting a pledge or pledging for the first time, but it's generally around the same number so I can budget for the next month," she said.

Because of its relative consistency, she uses Patreon to pay rent and keep her home office running.

Then, she uses numbers from other sources to round out the month’s expenses and know what she can and can’t purchase.

She’s extremely grateful to the patrons who have stayed with her over the past couple of years.

Because of that, she makes an extra effort to cultivate her relationship with patrons and tries to improve reward offerings whenever she can.

Kate has a Business manager who handles contracts with companies that want Kate to stream their game. He’ll offer her opportunities based on her interests, and she’ll accept or decline as she sees fit. She declines sponsorships more often than she accepts them — even though it means taking a hit to her income. Why? Because her fan base is more important to her than short-term monetary gains.

Kate said, "I don't want to alienate my audience by playing every sponsorship that comes at me, because then, when something comes at me that I really, truly love, there wouldn’t be the level of trust that I've built with them.

So, I only accept sponsored streams and sponsored products if it's something that I've been able to try, something that I believe in, and a company that I believe in."

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