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Comment by meheleventyone | Hacker News Reader

Not really!

If you arbitrarily take $50k as a living wage then it's basically the top 2000 streamers who can make a living on Twitch. Random googling tells me there were approximately 8 million active streamers in September. Again arbitrarily assuming that 7 million of those are 'casual' and doing it for fun that means the percentage of streamers making a living wage is 0.002%.

Back of the napkin math but kinda depressing.

Edit: Someone on Twitter told me that Affiliate status is pegged around the top 3% of streamers. So taking that as my new baseline for "trying to make it" since you can actually get paid out, it raises the percentage to a whopping 0.008%!

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Worthy read:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/16/17569520/twitch-streamers...

Right I take that sort of thing into account by snipping off the vast majority of people active streaming. Basically guessing that only the top million people streaming are actually aiming to make a living wage.

The thing with Twitch streaming is that you can do it from almost anywhere. So, $50k is maybe a bit high for a living wage.

Plus, Twitch is probably just one source of income for many content creators. For many it's not their primary source, but just a side source. YouTube, Patreon, OnlyFans, outside sponsors, or even esports may be where they make most of their money.

This is a, maybe, long way to get to this, but keep with me. I have always been fascinated by understanding what is edible, useful, or "traditionally medicinal" in the natural world around me.

I have spent decades of my life learning about how to use, propagate, and cultivate most plants, animals, fungi, and minerals (not the propagate part here) in an area +/- 100 miles from where I live. I've taught a couple of State University extension classes, and regularly sell at a farmers market the things I gather/grow, just for shits and giggles.

People have asked me for years why I don't do this for a living. Why don't I do that instead of working a job that I am neutral to, but that pays the bills.

Because all of that sounds exhausting. Needing to maintain a presence on so many platforms, interact with so many people, and constantly be thinking about my next thing for all of the various platforms is just exhausting.

I don't know how people can do it without burning out.

Don't they have helpers like gamers do?

So then there's even more pressure to perform, at a higher level even, to pay for the lives of myself at least one other human entirely. I still don't get it.

> The thing with Twitch streaming is that you can do it from almost anywhere. So, $50k is maybe a bit high for a living wage.

The thing is the power law curve is so strong that if we take the top ten thousand which sets a living wage at approximately $11.5k which is definitely not a living wage in a lot of places people stream from then that only improves things to the top 0.04% (of those trying to make it).

> Plus, Twitch is probably just one source of income for many content creators. For many it's not their primary source, but just a side source. YouTube, Patreon, OnlyFans, outside sponsors, or even esports may be where they make most of their money.

If you read the original comment the gross amount supposedly includes 3rd party revenue.

There's no way it includes all 3rd party revenue. Many big YouTubers have a Twitch, and occasionally stream on it, and they maybe make very little on their Twitch but would be near the top of this list from YouTube revenue. Dream, for example.

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