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Comment by SG- | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.)

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

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.

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

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