So, how much money do twitch streamers really make?

Games are slowly becoming part of our daily routine and it's a fact, more and more people are starting to recognize that gaming will eventually be more lucrative than most of other professions. One might argue that being a full time streamer is nonsense, but who gives a fuck when there's actual money in it? I believe majority of people here are aware of the fact that games, such as League of Legends, Counter Strike and Dota are considered to be an Esport that has it's own audience, reward pool, coaches and competitions.

Personally, I'm more like old school guy that spent his entire childhood playing outside (eating sand) but the reality is different now and we need to embrace those changes, implement them within our state of blocks and obviously provide better features than centralized platforms such as Twitch or Facebook...

There are four different ways for streamer to make an income : Donations, Subs, Add revenue and Sponsorship.

Donations

This one isn't hard to understand and is pretty straight forward. Viewers directly donate money to their favorite streamer via pay pal or credit card. The majority of donations will directly go towards streamer (around 1% cut goes to the platform). It's up to individual streamer to decide if they'll incentivize donations and give some special privilege to those who supported them via donations or not.

For the sake of argument, in the first top 100 streamers approximately around 3000 dollars can be earned with such a method. Of course, the numbers can get a lot higher - Under assumption one doesn't rewards it's users with private chat, or something like it.

Adds

Every time you open twitch stream you get served an add, and when it happens streamer earns a bit of money. Further more, streamers have an access to a special button - Add button. Every time they press that button their viewers get served another add. So basically it's up to streamer to decide how much time they will press that button. Although one can earn more money in a short term, he also needs to think of user experience.

Personally, every time i got served an add i wanna brake my fucking monitor and slap someone, especially when watching some documentary or stream.

To get a better insight, if one doesn't rape that fucking button, he can earn around 4k dollars per month. Of course, I'm talking about streamers who has at least few thousands viewers on daily bases...

Subs

Oh boy, here's where the real money starts floating in... Viewers can pay 5 dollars per month and get some benefits for it, but i assume you're already aware of it so I'll go straight on point.

For those streamers that have less than 10 k subscribers, Twitch platform takes cut of fucking 50%!

Let's assume one has 8 000 subscriptions per month. It's around 40k dollars worth of money. Twitch takes 20k and the rest goes to the streamer. It's insane thing to do - to take literally half of the money earned by somebody else.

Although I am aware of the fact that platform itself needs to make an income in order to keep up the development, 50% is waaay to much to take from someone.
On the other hand, those streamers who are considered to be high value partners have some benefits. In such case twitch take 30% of their income.

Worlds most popular streamer (Ninja) has around 120 000 month subscriptions. When we multiply it with 5 dollars we get around 600 000 dollars per month. After twitch takes 30% cut, he ends up getting around 400 000 dollars per month. Holy fuck, i knew they were making a lot of money but this is fucking crazy haha. But if you thought that's it you can't be more wrong.

Sponsorship

Although sponsorship has a huuuge range and it would probably take me few days to clear it all out, I'll try to keep it simple as much as i can.

Sponsored stream is a stream where streamer gets payed for playing certain game. For instance, Shroud (who is well know in gaming community - mostly plays PUBG) gets payed by EA games to promote their new Battlefield V. Before we jump into the numbers it's relevant to mention that streamers are legally obligated to mention the sponsorship, otherwise Federal Trade Commission could potentially interfere and make them pay fine.

Hourly rate for those sponsored streams ranges between 1 cent up to 1 dollar per viewer, per hour! hahahaha

Now imagine if one decides to accept the offer and in the best case earns 1 dollar per viewer. Now, if he is recognized by the community and gets, lets say 10 000 viewers, one will earn around 10 000 per hour hahahaha. Now we're talking about real money.

It's hard to say what are concrete conditions one to be payed more, but i'll mention few of them.

• How fun is the game
• How much people are actually watching it
• How much money does the company have

There is a lot more to it, but as i said, i'll try to keep it simple as possible... Now, when we have a better insight on how centralized entities work, we might get a hint in which direction we should go. Having in mind that Twitch is highly centralized platform where one company has a power to decide who's gonna stay or who's gonna get censored is pretty big deal, especially if you live out of it.

That's where the real power of decentralization comes... Hopefully we'll manage to make decent stream platform where everybody will be eligible to make money without a fear of being censored or removed. Hope you enjoyed :)