
Show HN: Monthly earnings of 23 Twitch streamer - malahay
http://efekarakus.github.io/twitch-analytics/#/revenue
======
SG-
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](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](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.

~~~
ericdykstra
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.

~~~
SilkRoadie
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.

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ianlevesque
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.

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

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

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giarc
Your use of 3 decimal places is confusing.

$ 914.132

Looks like either nine hundred or nine hundred thousand.

~~~
Dobbs
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.

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

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chacham15
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.

~~~
malahay
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 :)

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kmnc
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.

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DanBlake
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.

~~~
therealdrag0
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?

~~~
malahay
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.

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tmpaccz
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](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.youtube.com/watch?v=LzHPWZWnEOM))
[http://www.twitch.tv/sodapoppin](http://www.twitch.tv/sodapoppin)

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mmanfrin
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.

~~~
malahay
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](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.

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Kiro
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.

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ffn
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?

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markcerqueira
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).

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

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brickmort
the 3 decimal places made that number look _very_ misleading...

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kp666
think dota streamers make more

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

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patio11
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.

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Techbrunch
It made me think of this tumbler :|
[http://lookimagirlgamerz.tumblr.com/](http://lookimagirlgamerz.tumblr.com/)

~~~
jordsmi
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.

