Majority of TikTok's user base watches what TikTok decides to show them, which TikTok can optimize to lower their content creator payouts (and further optimized by only showing content that have been properly primed in the CDN). TikTok's monetization is also pretty nebulous and also terrible; Youtube's "bad" monetization rate is like $4 CPM, TikTok's is allegedly $0.001.
People choose what they want to watch on Twitch, which they have to pay as a portion of subscription costs to the channel.
No, I've just worked with Twitch and had friends in executive positions at Twitch. Many of their top streamers that pay the bills for Twitch are recruited and have employment/partnership contracts. They're very much paying for content during the time I had connections with them (pre-Amazon and a while after).
The nobodies that no one watches doesn't cost or earn Twitch very much.
I don't really follow the space, so if I use the wrong amounts or titles, someone please correct me.
For streamers with even a moderate following, they'll be in some status with Twitch to earn money off Twitch's ads. Don't recall if it's Affiliate or Partner or what, but the follower counts were surprisingly small to qualify for ad revenue.
Twitch pays out $3.50 per 1k ad views to those creators, so Twitch is paying for their content.
Tiktok has something that pays out to creators, but it's $0.20-$0.40 per 1k views and you need 10k subscribers to qualify (this seems much harder than Twitch's, which is in the hundreds iirc). It also looks like it was a one-time thing, where they set $300 million aside for that but I haven't seen any plans to continually fund it.
Doesn't this imply that Twitch needs to cut payouts then?
In the long run it seems like streaming as a career that is solely funded by the platform is dead. Streamers will need alternative sources of revenue (patreon, OF, etc) to keep things going.
That's already how it is among the SC2 twitch streamer community (and no doubt true for BW and other games with small but dedicated audiences).
Mid-tier streamers get the majority of their money from direct donations (which display a notification live on stream) and twitch 'subscriptions' the viewers buy for $5, split roughly 50/50 between streamer and twitch (usually to unlock access to their VoDs or other perks). Which really isn't the same as passive ad revenue from the platform, as users aren't exactly incentivized to give this money directly to twitch.
The successful ones actively solicit or otherwise encourage subs and donations, and those who struggle with this have generally moved on from the platform or away from streaming as a career. Many of them also have patreon for extra perks, plus a youtube channel with a more curated selection of videos (which I've heard pays better for the time investment, since the content is mostly already created for twitch streaming or sometimes other sources).
At this moment I'm watching a guy whose monetization strategy is a roulette wheel program with challenges and dumb stuff for him to do that gets rolled whenever a viewer donates above a certain threshold. As I am posting a viewer literally just hit "play 100 games" (obviously very low percentage roll, first time I've seen it) and the streamer is pleading with chat for them to let him play the 100 games over the weekend instead of right now. Pretty entertaining, and a funny coincidence to illustrate my point as I'm typing this.
Another guy who is a caster (like a sports announcer for e-sports tournaments) hosts tournaments via donations, ie every donation has a portion go to the prizepool and tournament costs. He has relationships with all the top pro-gamers in the scene and gets great line-ups for relatively small offered prizepools by being a community figure and also being a great organizer and scheduler, etc to accommodate the pro players to make it effortless for them to participate.
It's been this way for many years for streamers trying to make a living with 1-2k average viewers and below, typically working 40ish hours per week if I had to guess (not counting practice and any professional obligations with e-sports, sponsors, etc).
Anyway, I love professional SC2 even though I haven't played for years, and I spend way too much time on twitch.
$3.50 per ad view is a very different number than $.20-$.40 per video view.
I wasn’t aware of the “one-time” aspect of TikTok creator monetization, but I just find it hard to believe anyone is going to make good content without being paid for it.
The issue is you are thinking too narrowly by only looking at payments per view, ad, etc. Influencers don't care so much about that so much as the value of views as a metric. They don't get paid by the platform, they get payed by their audience and especially by advertisers for product reviews, placement, etc. But just like twitter, tiktok is full of people with no serious plans to get famous who put effort into making content. Same with HN. It's fun to shout creatively into the void when you get a bit of validation back in the form of conversations, arbitrary points, views, etc.
Twitch "pays" streamers with a cut of the money they made off them though. The paycheck is 1/2 a cut of money given to the streamer by a third party with no work from Twitch, and 1/2 a cut from ad revenues that were generated by the eyeballs accrued by the streamers.
