If you arbitrarily take $50k as a living wage then it's basically the top 2000 streamers who can make a living on Twitch. Random googling tells me there were approximately 8 million active streamers in September. Again arbitrarily assuming that 7 million of those are 'casual' and doing it for fun that means the percentage of streamers making a living wage is 0.002%.
Back of the napkin math but kinda depressing.
Edit: Someone on Twitter told me that Affiliate status is pegged around the top 3% of streamers. So taking that as my new baseline for "trying to make it" since you can actually get paid out, it raises the percentage to a whopping 0.008%!
Right I take that sort of thing into account by snipping off the vast majority of people active streaming. Basically guessing that only the top million people streaming are actually aiming to make a living wage.
The thing with Twitch streaming is that you can do it from almost anywhere. So, $50k is maybe a bit high for a living wage.
Plus, Twitch is probably just one source of income for many content creators. For many it's not their primary source, but just a side source. YouTube, Patreon, OnlyFans, outside sponsors, or even esports may be where they make most of their money.
This is a, maybe, long way to get to this, but keep with me. I have always been fascinated by understanding what is edible, useful, or "traditionally medicinal" in the natural world around me.
I have spent decades of my life learning about how to use, propagate, and cultivate most plants, animals, fungi, and minerals (not the propagate part here) in an area +/- 100 miles from where I live. I've taught a couple of State University extension classes, and regularly sell at a farmers market the things I gather/grow, just for shits and giggles.
People have asked me for years why I don't do this for a living. Why don't I do that instead of working a job that I am neutral to, but that pays the bills.
Because all of that sounds exhausting. Needing to maintain a presence on so many platforms, interact with so many people, and constantly be thinking about my next thing for all of the various platforms is just exhausting.
I don't know how people can do it without burning out.
So then there's even more pressure to perform, at a higher level even, to pay for the lives of myself at least one other human entirely. I still don't get it.
> The thing with Twitch streaming is that you can do it from almost anywhere. So, $50k is maybe a bit high for a living wage.
The thing is the power law curve is so strong that if we take the top ten thousand which sets a living wage at approximately $11.5k which is definitely not a living wage in a lot of places people stream from then that only improves things to the top 0.04% (of those trying to make it).
> Plus, Twitch is probably just one source of income for many content creators. For many it's not their primary source, but just a side source. YouTube, Patreon, OnlyFans, outside sponsors, or even esports may be where they make most of their money.
If you read the original comment the gross amount supposedly includes 3rd party revenue.
There's no way it includes all 3rd party revenue. Many big YouTubers have a Twitch, and occasionally stream on it, and they maybe make very little on their Twitch but would be near the top of this list from YouTube revenue. Dream, for example.
Insanely high or insanely low? I actually felt kind of weird that I make more as a software engineer than some of these legit celebrities (not the very top ones of course, but still more than many of the ones I follow or have heard of)
Keep in mind this is just what they make which Twitch knows about. Plenty of sponsorships, tournaments and other income streams exist for a majority of these people.
On top of that, besides their eceleb status, most of these people aren't that professional. Plenty of them are a combination of variety or casual, often to a degree the person isn't even that good in games in general.
Their production quality also isn't anywhere near amazing (note it can be both organic and high quality), and other parties (e.g. Hololive) have shown how easily the space can be disrupted. For those curious, notice how many top streamers still lack actual high quality audio (mostly from their own lack of voice training rather than equipment), proper schedules and sticking to those schedules, high quality video when applicable (e.g. bad light), allow themselves to get devolved in politics, allow their streams to go majorly off-track in general, etc. It's not like these guys don't have the means to drastically improve it.
And the obvious: we don't have anywhere as much of a shortage of people willing to play games in an extremely dedicated manner as doing software development.
The other thing for comparison to traditional jobs is the hours worked. Most streamers I follow work insane hours. Then the other bits and pieces they have to pay for themselves. For example taxes employers would otherwise cover and things like health insurance in the US.
On production quality, I think it's a mistake to think it matters too much. Live streaming is a different thing to television. In very much the same way Roblox is different to AAA games.
There's also a level outside of the more chaotic personalities who make a lot of money in spite of themselves where there is a lot of professionalism going in to making things seem pretty casual because these people know their audience.
The hours worked is all over the place really. Some of the top streamers don't work anywhere close to 40 hours or past it. Others grind 10 hours a day for almost every day of the year (often burning out a few years later). A lot of the top streamers do a combination of taking sporadic breaks, streaming only 3-4 hours a session, etc.
The other problem with looking at hours worked is it's hard to quantify sporadic interactions on multimedia and the likes. Arguably the biggest drain, most of these people are always "online" and have a hard time unplugging themselves. This is further exasperated by the momentum loss most streamers perceive when not streaming for a long while.
>On production quality, I think it's a mistake to think it matters too much
But we don't really know that yet. It's extremely hard to quantify all these variables and what truly matters. What we do know is many people in these circles have fallen to the side since they were unable to keep up with the modicum of effort newcomers put in despite their lack of resources and despite the first-mover advantage these old-timers had. At the same time, we see other parties break through with new concepts while putting in a ton of effort to market and PR themselves, and it worked, as seen with the Hololive example. The top earner is (apparently) also much more professional than the majority of the top 10/100/N.
>Live streaming is a different thing to television
If anything, this is the biggest problem. If beginners are expected/advised to put in much more effort and resources to (increase their odds of) breaking through compared to before, why is it acceptable for someone earning a Silicon Valley-equivalent salary while living in a much lower CoL area to stream in a dank basement or attic with poor audio quality? This isn't a criticism as much as a question. Maybe it doesn't matter. But it's also the question which makes people wonder "should they be earning as much as they do?"
I hope I didn't misread the numbers but to my understanding it's just what they get from twitch directly (ads/subscriptions share), most streamers probably make significant amounts in donations on top of that, and probably have secondary revenue streams via YouTube (stream highlights etc.)
