You can see the statistics for top earners at the bottom, obviously they're not all Twitch streamers but I've seen some in the top 10 before and the number is how much they've made as commission.
Why doesn't Twitch have their own donation system so they can take a cut of donations? Basically they need to implement StreamTip. They can then forbid partners (streamers who are allowed to have subs) from having any 3rd party tipping services. It's bad for StreamTip, but the profits for Twitch would be HUGE. There are some streamers, such as Lirik, whose main income from Twitch is probably tips. StreamTip already takes a cut of the tip, so it's not like the streamer would lose money if Twitch had their own tipping service.
This is how a lot of Chinese and Korean streaming services operate. And integrated donation system can allow for more interactive options between streamer and audiences, or even between audiences. (Like streamer present the audiences with two options, and the option that getting more donations will be chosen by the streamer.)
The guy in the first picture, Forsen, is one of the top 5 or 10 Hearthstone streamers in terms of viewers. Depending on his 'competition', I've generally seen his numbers between 5,000 and 10,000 concurrent viewers.
Winter, A guy with 2k viewers for starcraft said he made $70k in the past year. Forsen who is in that picture usually has 17-30k viewers and pushes donations a lot without ever running ads. Honestly i thought he was making more than what is in that picture. I forget what he said the other day. I think he said he was nearing 3k subscribers which would top that number up a lot.
Tbh from watching streams for a few years now, I think the big guys make MUCH more off donations than any ads/subs. Most of the big guys don't even run ads and strictly push donations.
A single guy has donated ~50k to the streamer sodapoppin
This cannot be emphasized enough. Without taking donations into account the predicted revenue is going to be so far off from the truth that it's pretty much useless.
"Advertisement money was estimated by assuming that Twitch pays $2 per 1000 ad viewers every 30 seconds."
That sounds like an extremely high CPM, much higher than the ad revenues I've seen. Unless I'm mistaken this could be exaggerating revenue by a large percentage.
Yeah that's a very good point, I couldn't find any reliable source on twitch's website. I had to dig in many /r/twitch comments to find the cpm and hoped that they were telling the truth.
In any case, I am pretty sure that my numbers are really a lower bound for how much money the streamers make. Most streamers receive more donations then subscribers, and donations don't have a fixed cost.
Yup, all streamers earn a lot more money from subscribers than ads. You can see that in their streams. They pay more attention to subs and most hardly ever run ads.
This is actually a good point, many of the higher viewer streams I see don't use ads all that much and many of the "full time streamers" really seem to value subscribers yet I imagine a strong reason for this is that a subscriber has a good chance at also being a donator. I Imagine twitch also uses subscriber numbers as a sort of measure as to who gets featured more often and such.
after spending a decent amount of time watching these streamers and participating in the league of legends community, it seems that actually a fair amount of viewers turn off ad-block while watching their favorite streamer. I do it for example, if it means that Pobelter http://www.twitch.tv/pobelter is gonna earn a bit more money.
* how many people who are watching a stream have some sort of adblock enabled?
* ads on twitch are not deterministic: some people (even without adblock) wont see ads
* how often do these streamers really play ads?
I assume that twitch (or at least the advertising partner) can tell that there wasnt a request to pull the ad (in the case of adblock), and so no ad was shown and thus not compensate the streamer. But given this possibility, the numbers could be off by a large margin especially because ads seem to be the primary source of income for these streamers.
* I've set an ad-block rate of 76% for viewers of a stream.
* that's a very good point, and it is not account. It was assumed that everyone gets to see an ad at the same time.
* This was estimated fairly well I think, I used the Riot Games API to figure out when a streamer's game has started. Almost every streamer run a 3 minute ad right before the game starts. So I've found how many viewers there were at that moment and then calculated the ad revenue.
I would be interested in seeing how this varies across different games and also for some of the larger general twitch streamers who play multiple games. There is a lot of money to be made but as you point out they do work very hard both in number of hours and all the extra community management they must do. I would also be curious to know how many of these full time profitable streamers also maintain high subscriber youtube channels.
Is the fact that subscriptions are recurring accounted for? If you get 1k subscriptions a month at 2.50 each, on month 2 you make 5k, no 2500 (assuming no drop off)
Also, I would say that the vast amount of streamers revenue comes from donations- Its trivial to see this is the case, just watch a large stream in action like sodapopping or the like, and you will see "blah has just donated x$" show up on their stream every 30 seconds or so.
FWIW, I am fairly certain the top streamers make over 50k a month very easily. However, those numbers drop very rapidly. The top 20 streamers most likely make as much as the next 5000 combined. And those 5000 make more than the next 10,000.
not in any way I could think of. It's usually only shown in the video and sometimes not even then. The chat does write when someone subscribes though, that's how I managed to scrape the subscriptions.
As a subscriber, I can confirm that it does auto-renew.
Also, twitch recently added the option to share the fact that you have paid for another month (by not cancelling) [0]. Taking note of these notifications is possible and would capture some of the resubscription data.
The subscriber count seems way off -- and subs don't appear in chat so I'm unsure how you're scraping from there. I know that imaqtpie has had single days where he got 700+ subs in a row (a 'sub train', where someone subscribes before a 5 minute timer counts down from the last subscription). 700 subs alone would be about 50% more than what you have his sub revenue at (e: *pre twitch cut) -- not counting existing subs which number (according to him) in the 5-7k.
I scraped data between 11/6/14 - 12/6/14 as mentioned in the article, the sub train event from qt was fairly recently so outside of my date range.
The subscribers do appear in the chat, I just sat 5 minutes in trick2g's chat and took a screenshot for you: http://imgur.com/MpOJ4CD
Now we can even get more data such as how frequently they subbed. This information wasn't there in november/december.
I've also mentioned in the FAQ that there were cases where the chat would freeze or another problem would occur and I would miss some subs. These are lower bounds but I highly doubt it's also as high as you are thinking. The sub train event is an outlier not part of the norm.
Many people on Twitch unsubscribe so they can subscribe again to get shoutout on the stream. How many subscribers out of those 700 were truly new? We don't know...
I know streamers with over 10 000 subscribers, which alone is $50,000 a month (Twitch takes a big cut of that but still). On top of that they receive donations every few seconds, in the range of $2 to hundreds. It's not unusual to see donations over $1000. Most streamers are completely transparent about their donations since they show up as notifications on the stream and the streamer thanking them.
Also, most streamers make pretty good money from referral programs.
If imaqtpie has about 15k median viewers, works at least 8 hours a day for 30 days straight, and makes about $15k from that, am I approximately right in saying, in video-game streaming land, the going rate is $0.0042 per hour per viewer?
Anyone know how this compares with TV show actors, Youtube clip makers, B-grade movie stars, and porno?
If so, maybe change "Money Earned" to something that mentions monthly? There appears to be no mention of monthly anywhere in the area of your graphs, which is the first thing I jumped to (skipping over the introductory paragraph that says you are looking at monthly revenue).
I have watched in excess of 100 hours of League of Legends, a game I've played for substantially longer than that. It's an easy, no brainer thing that one can do on an iPhone to relax after a hard day in the coding salt mines, and (unlike the game itself) doesn't require your undivided attention for 40 minutes.
As to what I get out of it: I don't know, similar to what people watching other people play basketball get out of that.
You typically watch the player as much as the game. The game simply provides the context for the entertainment. Also.. Competitive tournaments are a good watch. You may be surprised.
It also makes you better at the game you watch. So watch someone play hearthstone for a few hours and you likely be infinitely better if you are just getting started.
Why are people watching sport? Because it's easier than playing sport, because it's cheaper than playing sport and because those you're watching are better or more entertaining at sport.
I find girl streamers very... let's say amusing too. There's just one that is not like the rest. Speaks like 5 languages, painter/web designer. She is terrible at video games, but the streams are so chill and entertaining. Lots of painting on the stream actually. She's online now.
From time to time, a streamer will accidentally show a tab that shows how much he's made. Here's a recent one (I have no idea how big he is):
https://i.imgur.com/OLyQNpk.png
Most of them also make really nice referable money from G2A for each sale:
https://www.g2a.com/goldmine
You can see the statistics for top earners at the bottom, obviously they're not all Twitch streamers but I've seen some in the top 10 before and the number is how much they've made as commission.