Show HN: Monthly earnings of 23 Twitch streamer | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Monthly earnings of 23 Twitch streamer

efekarakus.github.io

92 pointsmalahay55 comments

It's been mentioned before, but I feel a lot streamers (big or small) make more money off donations which isn't tracked at all.

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.

I thought, "holy, why is that imgur link already grayed out for me" and then I realized, oh yes, forsen...

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.

I watch twitch a lot and have noticed that streamers who average 2,000 viewers or more treat streaming as their primary full time job.

By virtue of their popularity many of them also get endorsements, donations and other perks to supplement their subscription/ad revenue from twitch.

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.

Are you sure? I've never seen Forsen below 15,000 concurrent viewers. I would say 15,000 to 20,000 is his standard.

I also imagine sponsorships are big earners too. You can see them on the overlays and bellow the stream.

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.

I think you can see why Amazon bought Twitch, I'm sure all this will happen.

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.)

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.

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

Very interesting but this part concerns me:

"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.

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.

The estimated ad rate is way too high.

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.

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.

$2 CPM for video ads is really not that unusual.

True they are video ads. That's a good point. Still, twitch won't share all of it.

"We considered that only 24% of the viewers get to see the ads put up by the streamer according to a poll."

I don't know, I feel like that number just seems way too high.

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.

$2 is pretty good for rev share. Much of those impressions are clearing at $20+

Your use of 3 decimal places is confusing.

$ 914.132

Looks like either nine hundred or nine hundred thousand.

Likely he is European, where ',' and '.' are swapped when talking about money.

So that is $914,132 or nine hundred and fourteen thousand and one hundred and thirty two dollars.

It's monthly earnings so I doubt it's $914,132 and more likely just a formatting error.

One is 14,XXX.XXX. So I think the author just set decimal places to 3 instead of 2.

I feel like there is a large room for error here:

* 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.

Hello,

* 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.

Hope that made it clearer :)

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.

Hi Dan, nope the recurrence is not accounted, I didn't have any way of capturing it :)

Actually the subscription doesn't automatically renew. After 30 days they lose it and need to resubscribe, so I think your data should be fine.

> Actually the subscription doesn't automatically renew. After 30 days they lose it and need to resubscribe, so I think your data should be fine.

As far as I know (And from a cursory google search) it appears they do auto renew

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.

[0] - http://blog.twitch.tv/2015/01/subscription-announcements/

Oh my mistake. I remember a lot of people needing to manually re-sub but I guess they had just turned off the auto-renew option.

I haven't used Twitch much, would there be a way to scrape the donations? Is it only showed in video or also in chat or something?

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.

imaqtpie have 7k subs = +$21k/m. trick2g, nightblue3 5.5k subs. forsen $18045 in 16days from donations +$35k/m https://i.imgur.com/OLyQNpk.png

Sodapoppin have $50,000, $35,000 single donations. 1961+ sub train record in 1 day (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzHPWZWnEOM) http://www.twitch.tv/sodapoppin

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.

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 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.

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?

Are you the original author?

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).

Yeah, good point. I'll fix it once I get out of class :)

the 3 decimal places made that number look very misleading...

think dota streamers make more

I don't even know what Twitch is. Why are people _watching_ video games?

For your anthropological edification:

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.

For me Twitch has completely replaced watching TV. It's just casual and nice to have on.

Because sometimes watching is more fun than playing myself.

Watching Qtpie play League is more calming than me playing it myself. Watching Jodenstone speedrun OOT is more fun than me attempting it myself.

It's 'disrupting' the TV industry - so to speak.

It made me think of this tumbler :| http://lookimagirlgamerz.tumblr.com/

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.

http://www.twitch.tv/misscoookiez

I find it hilarious when the girls have their camera covering up more screen than the game. Obviously they know what people have come for.

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