Marketing expert reveals how much Twitch streamers are really making
During one of his own streams, N3RDFUSION CMO and former CLG CEO Devin Nash outlined the absolutely absurd amount of money that Twitch streamers are pulling in off of sponsorships alone, on top of the high amount they make just from streaming.
The allure streaming on Twitch is self-explanatory. Entertain people and make money by playing video games. The type of content one sees on the platform has expanded over the years, to include making art, playing music, hosting podcasts, and much more.
But the content itself isn’t the only thing that’s expanded on Twitch, so has the sheer amount of money that its top creators can rake in. So much so, that Nash warned his viewers of when top streamers or YouTubers claim they’re struggling, it’s more than likely not true.
Twitch: Dr Disrespect“99% of the time, they’re victimizing themselves and they don’t realize how well they’re doing,” he said. “The other 1% is someone not knowing how to monetize, and they’re not making money.”
He then broke down a couple of examples of what top streamer’s take-home looks like, using the examples of MOONMOON and Pokimane to showcase how big of a difference
According to Nash, the split between top streamers and Twitch when it comes to subscriptions isn’t 50/50, but instead 70/30. Allegedly, top streamers make $3.50 on a $5 sub.
Twitch introduced the Founders’ Badge in October to give streamers a way to reward the original subs.According to third-party tracker Twitch Stats, the same site Nash uses in the video, MOONMOON has roughly 25k active subs. That equates to somewhere near $88k per month just from subscriptions. Keep in mind that that’s a conservative number, that doesn’t include tier two or tier three subs.
MOONMOON allegedly makes an additional $500 a day in donations by conservative estimates, adding another $180k to his yearly totals. Between just subscriptions and donations, his revenue is close to $1.2 million for the year. That number doesn’t include Twitch ad revenue, cheers, or bits, and he doesn’t have any sponsorship deals or a currently active YouTube channel.
Nash compares that money to Pokimane, who he credits as being exceptionally smart when it comes to her monetizing efforts. If she gets the same split as MOONMOON for subscriptions, at just under 10k subs, she makes around $34k a month. But the drop off in money made from subscriptions is made up in other ways, including her own figurines.
mini me – november 22nd – 12 PM PST 😁 pic.twitter.com/oLsYvEHCgp
— pokimane (@pokimanelol) November 20, 2019
Sponsorships deals average somewhere between $15k to $20k per month for big streamers, according to Nash who also said the average is four sponsorships. If a streamer has the average number of sponsors at the average rate, that’s an extra $70k a month, which is an extra $840k for the year.
Then you add YouTube to that number, where someone like Pokimane averages 500k views across two videos a week, and can add an estimated $144k to the yearly totals.
This raised Pokimane’s yearly total, which includes Twitch subs, sponsorships, donations, and YouTube, to close to $2 million. Plus whatever she makes from merch and her beauty product line.
Nash hinted that he’d do more revenue breakdowns in the future, for streamers like Ninja and Dr. Disrespect. We can only wait and see how the value of streamers will increase as livestreaming platforms continue to grow and expand.