> and each Twitch stream attracts over two thousand viewers. It's not a good way to make a living.
To contrast with that, I know twitch streamers whose channel averages out at around 300 viewers a time, and who make a very comfortable living. Having a properly run channel that encourages donations, cash and bits, is a huge part of it.
I've seen streamers who pull an easy $200 a day in donations. Add in 500 or so subs, and it isn't too hard to break 6k a month. Not enough to live in the Bay Area, but a really nice salary in most of the country.
>twitch is one of the platforms where I feel like I've struggled the most to get viewers.
That's expected though. It's also true of YouTubers, and Instagram 'influencers'. Because the barrier to entry is low, you're competing with hundreds of thousands of other streamers for the same set of eyeballs. Except for a tiny minority, the vast majority of you will never make a penny from streaming. Do it as a hobby, but don't expect to make a living off of it.
> I've seen people talk about girls on OF making hundreds of thousands of dollars a month and while I'm sure some are, I wish people would understand how few are actually making that amount.
I think this is the same result of people who look at Twitch and think they can be the next Ninja or Shroud. Yes, there are people on Twitch that make many thousands of dollars a month. The odds of becoming one of those people is vanishingly low for someone starting out fresh, and it takes many years to build up to that point. These are people who spend 8+ hours in front of a camera interacting with a live audience, 6-7 days a week, not to mention all of the things that happen in the background. Joe Shmoe in his house, streaming a couple hours a night when he gets off work, is likely not going to make it.
> It takes a lot of skill to constantly produce content at the rate that millionaire twitch streamers do.
Well, that's disputable. Most content-sources are delivered externally, in form of games and stuff they can react too. It's not like they sit there and think up something fresh by themselves for 8 hours a day. Though, yes, they have some naturally skill in socializing which they hone over time. But still I would not say it goes beyond the skill of any other natural socializer which exists in any community.
> Most of them own youtube channels as well, which requires additional time to process, edit, and mix videos, depending on what they're doing with it.
Which is most of the time not done by them. Usually they pay people for this. And to be fair, Videos of streamers are usually not really masterpieces either. They are optimized versions of their streaming-content. A good youtube-creator has significant more skill there. They occasionally also create far higher quality of content than most streamers.
> It's an incredibly demanding gig, that, at the very least, requires a pretty insane schedule, or being really passionate about the job.
How many streamers do you actually know? Well scheduled is not really what I would call most streams I've seen.
> Maybe some streamers get help in production and orchestrating their stream, but for most it's more than a full-time job commitment.
If you are a fulltime-streamer, earning money, then they pretty much all get help to some degree.
> Those average Joes you mentioned? They get 1-2 viewers, who are usually their closest friends.
Not really. They are many dedicated hardworking people with similar skill-levels even on the lowest levels. Success in streaming depends far more on luck than skill. Though, luck is also a skill in some way, so hard to say...
But the skills I was talking about are not the ones you are getting naturally but being alive or just doing stuff long enough to acquire them. Obviously if you stream long enough you get a bunch of skills and knowledge automatically, which any non-streamer is missing yet. But that is nothing special.
Special is stuff not everyone has or can acquire on it's own. Like a professional who went through a long professional training, reaching a level of quality a normal selfmade-streamer never can reach. Or someone which a career outside of streaming. There are more and more people like that hitting the platforms. Many entertainers with decade-long careers came in the pandemia to twitch and youtube, searching for new playgrounds and displaying skills which leaves any big established streamer in the dust.
>Working seven days a week as a professional gamer is pretty brutal.
I'm gonna throw some shade towards gameplay streamers. Streamers who do focused content and actually produce shows as you would in a TV/Radio studio have a real job which I've actually done, so this doesn't include them.
Playing a game and running a stream, technically, is not hard. Engaging with viewers is not hard. There's a bunch of solutions out of the box that allow you to manage subscription announcements, overlays, and other stuff, so that isn't too hard either. Spending time in a chair isn't hard. 4-5 hours of working out per week and healthy diet choices would help that, but isn't a panacea because research shows sitting for long periods is bad anyway. I wouldn't be surprised if there was some kind of viewer management software akin to CRM software that make it easier to relate to a larger amount of people. After all, people have limits on the amount of social connections they are able to manage themselves. So remembering your viewers may not even be hard.
The hard part comes with people being unprepared to essentially become public figures (very much in the Hollywood or political sense) and being unable to deal with harassment, death threats, and insults and the worst part of internet. If you don't have enough viewers to shrug off a controversy, your channel will get small, you'll lose revenue, and likely start stressing out about that as well. Having a fallback career plan is essential.
But if you are mentally tough and don't repeat the mistakes of other streamers and public figures (which is likely conveniently available for you to watch), being a streamer is not difficult. Not like other careers. Making money is a different story -- you can do everything right and still not be popular because the mob is fickle. That's just career luck, which isn't specific to streaming. You shouldn't be a public figure if you aren't prepared mentally for it. Twitch can only ban so many people.
However, I very much support tapping this revenue stream. I truly don't care if a loser drops $500 on a streamer who's showing cleavage as long as she's of legal age -- more power to that streamer. And it's up to parents to police their kids watching cleavage streamers. That's not really Twitch's job.
Just call it for what it is: easily hacking viewership for revenue. The exception being taking care of yourself mentally first.
> Extremely small percentage of those who are doing social media are actually making money.
Some people are just better at it, have better circumstances, work ethic, are more lucky or something like that. I stream on Twitch occasionally, as does one of my friends. Their channel has grown to being 3x the size of mine in months, whereas I've been occasionally streaming for over a year. Their earnings from that are also a multiple of mine.
Neither of us really have large communities, but some people will have 10 or 100 better growth than either of us, which is probably applicable to most types of content generation or platforms out there. Here's some info about Twitch from years ago, some interesting trends: https://sullygnome.com/articles/normalgrowthontwitch (many content creators will never really "make it big")
I know of more than half a dozen who are just Super Mario Maker streamers.
I know, my pure happenstance, of two cooking streamers who have built communities.
I think low double digits is a low ball estimate. There are more successful retro gaming streamers than that, I have no idea what the contemporary game twitch scene is like.
No one ever talks about 300 viewer streamers, they make for lousy news stories. Drama with super successful streamers, and articles like this one that talk about failure at the bottom.
Someone working 9-5, 40 hours a week, pulling in 40-50k a year isn't a news story.
> They are your average Joe, with barely any special skill.
Absolutely, provably false.
It takes a lot of skill to constantly produce content at the rate that millionaire twitch streamers do. Most of them own youtube channels as well, which requires additional time to process, edit, and mix videos, depending on what they're doing with it.
It also takes a high level of creativity in order to come up with new ideas for streams, keep the audience engaged while playing the same game for hundreds of hours on end. This means doing giveaways, interacting with the audience without offending them, planning contests, negotiating advertising deals with game-makers for promo-streams, etc. etc.
It's an incredibly demanding gig, that, at the very least, requires a pretty insane schedule, or being really passionate about the job. Most people would burn-out at their rate, and a lot actually do.
Maybe some streamers get help in production and orchestrating their stream, but for most it's more than a full-time job commitment.
Those average Joes you mentioned? They get 1-2 viewers, who are usually their closest friends. This the skill ceiling for "barely any special skill" people. If they stream a game that just came out, they may break 10 viewers once in a while. That's about it.
> Streamers don't do any of that; they literally sit in their basement and play video games all day. Why do they need support?
The way you chose to phrase this hints at your opinion towards playing a lot of video games.
I personally have subscribed to a tournament host and various (ex-)professional players at times just because I valued the content they produce enough to be okay with giving money to them.
> Does a streamer with more support produce better content than a streamer with less support?
In many cases yes they do, because higher income can make way for dedicated streaming hardware, better gaming hardware, better internet connections and probably other things too.
>Twitch is a step in the other direction, where if you faithfully consume content from any Twitch channel, you have to sit down and watch for hours every night when the streamer is online. Who does that? I imagine it's mostly students and single young professionals.
Streaming is great "background noise" for when you're bored and sitting around the house. It fills the same niche that I think sports does for sports people. It's live entertainment with no fixed outcome.
> Streamers don't do any of that; they literally sit in their basement and play video games all day.
You seem to be missing what they do: they are entertainers. They aren't "playing video games" all day; that's just the medium. People come to see the entertainer. The most successful streamers create a unique character that people want to see, often regardless of the specific game being played.
Some people also integrate legitimate review and and critique into some of their shows (not to be confused with the current plague of "reviews" that are actually paid native advertising).
> Sure, watching a stream is entertaining
See, you do understand. Being an entertainer is work. Just like the standup comic, the better streamers/youtubers know they are putting on a show. It may be unscripted, but that may make the job harder requiring a quicker wit.
> The only thing I can think of is more support might allow a streamer to devote more of their time to streaming.
That's the point. If you like someone's work and want more, paying them so they can spend more time creating is a good idea.
(as others have said, some are also a kind of club/community manager where they also maintain other things such as a community game server or website/forum)
> It's an open question if Twitch gets anything out of non-pro-gaming streamers.
> Ultimately those dollars come at the expense of others, there is limited attention and money,
What? There are huge untapped markets for live streams of "things" outside pro-gaming. I have zero interest in gaming but watch streams of people doing various projects (mostly on Youtube, but this is just showing there is a market).
> people also spend a lot of money on virtual slot machine games... it sucks the air out of the room for other developers making creative or useful stuff.
This seems an incredibly zero-sum way of looking at it. Maybe there is some cross-over between some zero-effort casual gaming and gambling, but that is a long way from "useful stuff".
> Every time I see articles talking about this subject, it's always completely focused on Twitch streamers that stream for a living.
Because, for the most part, those are the only people affected by these problems. If you don't stream with the intent to maximize your viewer counts and profits at all costs - stream when you feel like it, play what you want, don't chase trends, don't encourage parasocial relationships - you're basically immune to most of these issues.
Relying on Twitch streaming for income is a hard life. Anyone who doesn't realize this is delusional.
You're talking 10-12 hours _every day_ entertaining people. Successful streamers work 6-7 day weeks at those hours and if they're lucky take 2 weeks off a year -- one of those spent at TwitchCon. Most of them are playing the same game for long stretches of time (months to years). That's really hard!
And if you regularly have ~3k viewers, you'll probably earn $2k-4k a month between ad money and donations. Except for outliers, obviously. The overwhelming majority of streamers are not successful, by the way, or are only successful for a year or two.
It's absolutely a labor of love. You do it because you can't stand doing the alternative.
> Whereas for the middle of the road streamer (let's say 1-2k viewers at any given time)
Sentences like that show me how far removed my twitch experience is from others. Middle of the road, 1-2k viewers. The biggest thing I watch has 200 something viewers, sometimes with a raid(s) we reach 300-500.
Recently, I watched CohCarnage (because he had early access to an alpha releasing the next day), and he had a few thousand viewers. Chat was just a constant stream of letters. Impossible to have a conversation or even keep up with what’s going on. I disabled the chat a few minutes in, I do not get the appeal of mega streams.
>did a subathon where each new sub extended the time he continuously streamed by a little. He ended up streaming for 30 days.
This isn't really an achievement on its own when many big names stream every day anyway, and they draw huge amounts of money playing into psychological factors to do it. Subathons are predominantly just ways to prey on people's weaknesses and use hype to get more money and exposure. The quality of the streamer also suffers massively.
And that really shows the heart of it all: dark patterns, softcore sexual pandering and 'metas' have a strong hold on the market, leaving very little for what streaming used to be 10-15 years ago. Twitch being the biggest and having strong reinforcing mechanics doesn't help, either.
>There's a lot of people chasing the dream at the moment, and of course that's no different than trying to be a movie star, but part of me winces when I open up twitch and see that all this awkwardness is so public and often permanent.
At some level, I suspect that at least most people waiting tables, going to auditions, and waiting for their big break knew it was a long odds crapshoot.
I wonder to what degree that's true of all the people chasing money on Instagram, YouTube, or Patreon. Certainly for software, for example, Patreon feels like something a lot of people latch onto in the belief that it's a sustainable business model and it almost certainly isn't. As you say though, at least those folks are probably reasonably well positioned to just get a regular 9-5 job.
To contrast with that, I know twitch streamers whose channel averages out at around 300 viewers a time, and who make a very comfortable living. Having a properly run channel that encourages donations, cash and bits, is a huge part of it.
I've seen streamers who pull an easy $200 a day in donations. Add in 500 or so subs, and it isn't too hard to break 6k a month. Not enough to live in the Bay Area, but a really nice salary in most of the country.
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