The Dire, Bullshit Economics of Twitch Creators | Hacker News Reader

The Dire, Bullshit Economics of Twitch Creators

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42 pointshaywirez21 comments

A somewhat disingenuous article discussing a problem as old as the entertainment industry and painting it as Twitch being somehow uniquely exploitative.

> I hope I convinced you to mentally categorize the average hard-working streamer’s career hopes accurately — well into the lottery ticket territory.

98% of channels on Twitch aren't monetized. They don't get revenue share because they don't generate any revenue. The bar for monetization on Twitch is very low. So low that "the average hard-working streamer" should be able to meet it pretty easily. Among monetized channels the percentage making minimum wage is closer to 1.5% - very low, but not what I would call "lottery ticket territory".

It's also worth noting that at the time of the leak about 50% of active channels on Twitch were about a year old. It takes years to start seeing any sort of "real" money from entertainment, and that's not unique to streaming. The chart in the article showing distribution of earnings seems to show a pretty typical power distribution, which is to be expected in entertainment media.

Thanks for sharing your critical thinking. These kinds of puff pieces get eyes, but are pretty deceptive.

I suppose, that in terms of Twitch monetization we can talk only about revenue from:

1. subscriptions

it takes only 250 tier 1 subscribers to reach that 15 000$/year, if we take into account, that twitch is taking 50% from charges

2. ads

This actually turns away all the casual watchers, who are not subscribing, but only donating. Subscribers do not see ads in most cases anyway, so there is not that much income for streamer.

3. bits

They were implemented to take away cut from donations. Not really useful, compared to other types of donations from paypal, patron or from donations that are going into cryptocurrencies wallets.

I'm very sceptical about that twitch streamers who do streaming as a serious job only get 15 000$/year(more like 15 000$/month would be more realistically, otherwise there would be not that many twitch thots who have switched from streaming in adult industry to twitch - their income numbers from streaming on twitch were posted to be in range of 60 000$ - 90 000$ per month, so they are not nowhere that poor, as those who are donating to them). For a well established streamer donations are rarely less than 100$ per stream. That makes very decent salary even for US.

PS only insane person can write with green ink article, to irritate anyone else who is trying to read that BS crap article.

> 98% of channels on Twitch aren't monetized.

Can't edit, but it's 92.8%. I typo'd it.

Anyway, there seems to be assumption, that those 92,8% are also streamers. They are not - they are mainly watching others. So, to take a closer look on Twitch monetization, there has to be data only about streamers, that excludes watcher accounts, or those that are not doing seriously any streaming. As a rule of thumb, if they are not affiliated and not receiving income from Twitch, then those 92,8% Twitch accounts are not streamers or as the article states - they are not content "creators". It still is a lazy article for what it claims to represent.

Yeah, just take a reasonable comparison. Youtube. I think everyone there have a channel, some minority have even videos. Still just because I have uploaded a few things doesn't make me a content creator. And I shouldn't be included in any math involving content creators.

atleast the upfront investment for that career is very low

Damn. 0.117% of twitch streamers making even 15kUSD a year is rather bleak in terms of calling it a potential career.

What is the percentage of musicians or actors or comedians making over $15K per year?

probably not much better, but as the article points out, influencer/streamer is now the most popular future job in the eyes of many kids.

"People have always invested incredible amounts of their youth into pursuing dead-end career choices. But we deserve to do so for the right reasons and to channel our creativity towards better goals."

These new platforms are unique in that they give a widespread young audience the idea that this is some sort of ordinary career. Nobody ever believed that about comedians.

I'm not too worried. When I was a kid some of my peers invested incredible amounts of their youth into pursuing professional sports careers. None of them succeeded, but I think most of them eventually did fine in other fields.

0.117% of everyone who streams on Twitch, even people who just stream one game to some friends every now and then.

It looks like a huge number to me. More than the percentage of people who play music making that money even, and music has been with us since the dawn of time, and has a huge industry. Twitch is just a streaming service.

That's a very visually repulsive website with titles for graphs/charts made for Antman and co.

Describing the shove sellers as LARPing content creation is very incisive. Funny how often the most successful are often selling "how to sell/create" or some fictional image of creation.

even the word "creator" these days often means someone making a podcast/youtube channel/mail list, instead of... you know someone who creates things those people talk about (engineers, film makers etc)