(TTS donations, 3rd party revenue like OnlyFans, Patreon, Amazon Gifts and sponsorship deals... are not included)
Total gross payout in the leak (2019/8 to 2021/10) was 4.2 billion dollars across 344k users. (based on data points above alone but could be wrong since it's annons on 4chan.)
PS: Make sure to change your Twitch (and possibly Prime) password. Twitch is already prompting users to do so based on Reddit posts.
I don't think it's funny, I think it's sad because most of it comes from the emotional exploitation of parasocial relationships.
Something we used to scoff at in places like Asia, now even casual relationships are utterly commoditized and we taught a whole generation of young humans how that's the most normal thing in the world.
Agreed. I recently started exploring Twitch and in the first hour of just sitting there watching it, I was surprised how aggressively, exploitative it was. The fact that it's young people there exploiting makes it even more gross.
Isn't that the basis of the economy with the increasing wealth gap and so on? It's not really materially different to paying Disney millionaires to go watch the latest Marvel movie.
>It's not really materially different to paying Disney millionaires to go watch the latest Marvel movie.
I feel like it's substantially different, you are paying Disney the money to watch the movie, you don't really care about the actors or other people who worked on it.
On the other hand, twitch users pay for the sake of paying money, it's closer to something like strip clubs.
That's a pretty harsh moral/value judgment on how someone chooses to spend their entertainment money.
What about comedy clubs? If I buy a ticket to see Dave Chappelle, who is clearly wealthy, am I sucker too?
What about paying cover at my local bar because a local band is playing that night?
What about buying tickets to a baseball game, to see a bunch of millionaires play a game for a few hours?
You are making it seem like users get nothing for their money, when there is plenty of established precedent for giving money in exchange for attending a performance.
Sure the performance has changed, but the actual difference here is that these Twitch millionaires (and the rest who are far from millionaires) are literally charging "pay what you can" instead of setting a minimum ticket price for their show. Plenty of people (the majority in fact) get the show for free.
Sorry, I didn't mean that in a derogatory way. I just meant twitch users pay for the sake of giving money to their favorite streamers rather than paying for a product. Strip clubs are the first example that came to my mind, bands or comics also stand. My point was that OP's argument about comparing twitch to movies doesn't make sense because paying for a movie is no different than paying for groceries.
> because paying for a movie is no different than paying for groceries
Groceries are necessary for survival, and limited in quantity.
Movies and streams are similar to each other because they are both video content. And as long as the creator of the stream or the company behind a movie get paid enough to make the content they could’ve received no more money and still gotten by fine.
Streams are a little bit different from movies though because much of the audience is actively engaging in conversation with the creator or making requests to them etc. In that sense a stream has an aspect of limited supply to it that a movie does not. At some point the audience of a stream will be too big for the creator to be able to meaningfully interact with all of them, and at a point after that maybe even too big to be able to meaningfully interact with any of them.
And so if you have a lot of people that want to interact with you it makes sense to prefer interacting with the ones paying you money, and to encourage them to do so. And beyond that, it also makes sense to offer “exclusive” content to people that pay. So OnlyFans makes sense too.
What really has me upset though is thinking of the people that are on the audience, among whom some people have little money but also get so little attention IRL that they are paying someone who already has a lot just to interact with them and maybe even being deluded into thinking that they have some form of “real” relationship with them. That is very sad and something I don’t think has been studied enough and is not being talked about enough.
I sub to twitch streamers I watch because dollar per hour it's the cheapest form of entertainment besides torrenting for me.
There was a stint during the GTA V RP craze I had it on in the background and watched it for approximately 6-8 hours every day. I subbed to one streamer for like 5 bucks.
This averages out to like 2 cents/day for 240 hours of entertainment. Cheaper than netflix, cheaper than cable, cheaper than hulu... You catch my drift. I don't know how this is different than me paying $80 to spend a night out at the movies with my wife, other than it being insanely cheaper?
> I just meant twitch users pay for the sake of giving money to their favorite streamers rather than paying for a product.
I still think this is a narrow view.
So you don't consider a performance to be a product?
How is going to the movies different from going to a baseball game or a concert or a comedy club?
If those are like movies, and movies are like groceries, are we not back to the same point that people are exchanging money for some kind of benefit, whether it's a tangible thing they take home or an experience they enjoy?
I think strip clubs are a fair comparison. All of the things you listed, you pay money for access to the experience. The money changes hands before you get in the door. For both strip clubs and twitch, getting in the door is free. In both cases what you pay money for is the attention of the streamer/stripper in the moment you are giving the money (or just because you feel like giving money to them for the performance you are seeing.)
A less emotionally evocative example might be giving money to a street musician who accepts requests for donations. Either way, the street musician is there performing and you can enjoy the music whether you pay or not. But the money gets you a bonus, and you’re free to give money regardless of desire to request a song.
I'm not sure I agree that "paying money to get attention" is the majority of the monetary interactions on Twitch.
Or at least, maybe that's a welcome side effect but not the main motivation for a lot of people.
I am guessing here, I have no data to back this up, but I feel like a lot of people sub out of gratitude and as a show of support, and less to draw attention or get some kind of shout-out..
I do watch a decent amount of streams on Twitch across a few categories, but I've never subscribed or donated to any of them, so it's possible I'm wrong here.
Also I did make the distinction between paid performances and "pay what you can".. That was indeed my point, that Twitch differentiates itself by being an essentially "pay what you can" service where the majority don't pay anything, but lots of people still manage to make money giving their work away for free.
Groceries are so far outside of paying for any form of entertainment. What does it matter if you pay for a movie or tip a streamer? It's all content meant to be consumed and replaced with more content.
There are three things you need to survive: food, shelter, and love/community.
Entertainment can sometimes provide the last one (love/community) but for the most part it's fulfilling a need for distraction and/or curiosity.
Like with strip clubs, when you give money to a Twitch streamer, you're getting something in return. Twitch subscribers get lots of exclusive access to stuff.
Twitch streams aren't free though. If nobody paid then they wouldn't exist. It's just a voluntaryist model. Those that pay, do, those that can't or don't want to, don't. So I'm not a sucker for choosing to fund a form of entertainment I find valuable.
I treat museums the same way. When I was young and poor my parents didn't pay to get in since it was optional. But now that I'm older and I make good money, I donate extremely well when I go to museums. I know that it's voluntary and I choose to participate in funding it because I enjoy the experience.
Even if no one paid, they would easily exist through ads and sponsorships. Paying a rich person for something free is just bad money management no matter how you rationalize it to yourself.
Do you think the same way with movies? Many movies could probably survive on ad placement revenue alone. Why do you pay to go to the movies? Do you think the same way with buying a laptop? I'm sure you could fund a laptop with ad and bloatware placement, so why do you pay bill gates for a surface book?
If nobody paid to go to the movies, then nobody would want to advertise in those movies, those movies would lose their sponsorships, and stop being made. If everybody unsubbed from netflix right now they would stop funding original content, even though the content they make has ad placements. Why even ask netflix for money if you can just make a wildly successful tv show with ad placements and release it for free?
Why should you pay to go to a football game? Why should you pay to watch a football game? All the players have sponsors. They're all millionaires. Why did our parents pay for cable? Cable had ads, all the actors were millionaires, the cable company owners were millionaires, the production studios were millionaires. You're saying practically everyone who bought cable in the 1990s-2000s was bad with their money because the actors were millionaires and had ad sponsrships? Give me a break.
I just think it's incredibly disingenuous that because someone is leveraging a SLIGHTLY different monetization model that allows for free consumption, that anyone who pays for it is bad with their money. Maybe if you condemned ALL luxury spending with the same energy I could see you're at least being consistent. But this is just more irrational disdain for the new wave of media consumption.
Some people, on the other hand, like to reward others if they enjoy the product/service/performance they provide.
That's the nature of "pay what you can". If money is tight, then don't pay, and don't feel bad about it. But if you have disposable income, and you value the experience, then give what you can as a form of gratitude.
It doesn't need to be said that if everyone took the "it's free so I don't have to pay anything" route, then there would be no show to see.
I mean....sure, I guess, if you're only talking about the top 10 or maybe top 200 streamers.
My favorite twitch streamer, 'x5_pig' (996th highest earner on twitch) only grossed $186,000 over 24 months, and lives in a fairly HCOL area in Australia. I'm happy to give him $5 or so to help make sure that he continues to stream an EOL game, Starcraft2.
Sure, he has other revenue streams as well but I can only imagine the risk he takes by sticking with a game that's been EOL'd. When Blizzard shuts down the servers I imagine he'll have no career left at all and will likely have to start over in a totally different career. I'd be surprised if he could start streaming some other strategy game and maintain enough earnings.
I pay him $5/month to help swing his risk-reward balance in favor of continuing to produce the content that I most enjoy vegetating to after my 12 hour day of coding/troubleshooting/collaborating.
Sure, he has other revenue streams (YouTube, announcing for major tournaments, etc). But I imagine for him it may be important to earn enough over the 10 year life of Starcraft2 to mostly-retire in case he ends up without a "real" career.
In fact, sometimes I wonder whether income tax brackets could potentially include consideration for short-lived high earning careers. Seems it might be slightly broken to tax someone who has a stable $1MM/year income for 30+ years (e.g. car dealership owner) the same % as someone who makes $1MM this year, but next year might be earning $40,000 working at that car dealership (athletes, streamers, windfalls, etc). Seems like it might make sense to allow people to "defer" earnings to future years, as long as income tax is eventually paid in full. This could allow people who unexpectedly earn $1MM for just one year to spread out those earnings over 10 years and pay a more appropriate % as taxes. Not sure what else this could break though, or how much of a problem it really solves vs. other things legislators could be spending time on.
I would assume big streamers are running a business too. At the very least they are paying an accountant and probably lawyer (for incorporation, taxes). I'm sure some are also paying designers, editors, marketers, advertisers, agents, managers, etc.
On youtube you have streamers merging under the same umbrella to create branded channels.
IMO the differences compared to Disney is the scale of the production and the interactive medium (which is constrained by scale). Once you reach a certain scale I don't think you can expect much direct interaction due to the volume of chat. So really it's just scale.
I mean it's not cynical (at least not anymore than your initial comment), it's what we're doing and why I used another entertainment option as a point of comparison.
Of all the things on Twitch the value of Hot Tub streams seem very upfront and I think it's pretty telling that there are vanishingly few successful streamers doing it and that for all the hot air people spew about its a very niche part of the site.
Same as with paying to see a Disney movie: entertainment. It's just a bit more interactive, since streamers are a bit more likely to interact with you after you give them money.
Is there a point you're failing at making? In my mind it's no different than, say, voting for contestants on talent shows, or paying a camgirl, or pay-per-view WWE events. Same thing targeting a different demographic.
I think the word you are looking for is entertainment. You may not appreciate the value of said entertainment, but then I don't really see a merit of donkey shows, Kanye or just about any other entertainment figure. That is the value.
Are you using VHS for said taping? I suddenly wonder if this is one of those anachronistic phrases, or if people no longer use it and you're revealing your age.
To be fair, the number of millionaires is overall pretty low in numbers. Just some few dozen worldwide. Most top-streamers "only" earn as much as upper middle-class or less. Compared to other sketchy businesses, this seems relative ok. Be aware that those numbers are before taxes and are not including expenses, which can be quite high in the top league.
Yeah, it's so absurd it's hilarious. Seeing people make millions of USD for playing games and mentioning others in a live stream made me seriously rethink the value of my own work.
Yeah, and what's wrong with that reaction? I'm supposed to just accept this stuff?
The blue collar workers are right too. They should be getting paid a lot more. Certainly not less than streamers. It's not fair and I refuse to accept it.
Come to think of it, advertisers seem to be a major cause of these distortions. They distort the value of activities that happen to have an audience. Yet another reason to block ads: help restore balance to society by ensuring people are properly rewarded for the actual value of their work instead of how many eyeballs they can summon.
Because that's not the field of work I chose for myself. I do see construction workers on a daily basis though. I also know the owner of a construction company, he's part of my extended family. The wealth disparity between the workers and my family member is obscene. There's no way I'll ever believe they couldn't be paid better wages.
There’s a very large nearly endless supply of laborers that can do this type of work though. The more niche your skill set the higher you can demand in pay. This is economics 101. You are putting this into a moral space that doesn’t reflect economic realities.
It somewhere between "paying to not see ads" (mechanical) to "being a fan and wanting to contribute to them" (parasocial). I don't think most people care if they're a fan of a millionaire - see sports and entertainment celebrities. Looking at things reflexively through a wealth-inequality perspective is done only by a minority of people.
I was watching a streamer the other day and she was doing some stunt because another streamer promised her an iphone 13 pro. But now I realize she could buy hundreds of them! Argh. Here i am waiting two months so i could afford to put a down payment on one.
In streaming case, for whatever reason you want to make a donation to somebody, not doing it because they are richer than you seems very strange to me.
> I wonder if this'll lead to software engineers in big companies having more restricted access to code?
I don't think that Twitch has closed source code because they want to keep code private. It's probably more a matter of don't want to show commit message in case there are some bad words inside it. And don't want to show the world in case their source code look bad.
Twitch without its code source can't work yeah, but imagine if all the commits of Twitch were public I doubt it would change anything for them.
That would be nice if their was a mental change about source code and that it is fine to show it even if it looks shit.
You don't think the largest streaming platform on the planet wants to keep their intellectual property a secret? This isn't about being embarrassed over some comments, it's about completely revealing the algorithms that move streams to the promoted views, limitations of their filtering systems, the time it takes for someone to count as a 'viewer'... there are many pieces that are no longer secret and can now be manipulated by people trying to promote content or game the recommendation system or bypass filtering.
There is also the issue of security. I'm sure people will be combing through the source code to find anything they can exploit, even if it's a simple XSS attack. It could either be sold/used for malicious actions or submitted to the bug bounty program for the reward money.
Doubt they care too much about bad words in commit messages, what they should worry about is if they've ever checked in passwords/secrets/private keys and not re-written the git history
Commit messages that imply anti-competitive behaviour ("Committing a change to the API to lockout competitor XYZ").
Commit messages that imply code theft ("Using a method that we used at my previous company").
etc.
Sometimes things that look sketchy might be innocent but will still cause nightmares for twitch since they'll now have to play defensively as people call into question anything that ever went into the repo.
Dozens? The 4chan post said "almost 6,000 internal Git repositories". We don't use git at work (TFS, yay), and we definitely aren't on their scale, but that seems high to me. Do they have a repo for every class? Is this normal?
I've never worked in this way (when I've been part of the org), is it that common? What are the benefits of making everyone fork repos vs branching off the original repo?
It's common in general open source projects where you might want to send a patch for something that you don't have commit priveleges too, but I've never seen that used in enterprises as they have central auth / groups with the users required to work on the code.
I worked at a large gaming company and that was definitely the collaboration model.
Before per-branch controls, the only way to disable write access (while maintaining read access, pull-request privs, etc) to a repository's blessed branches was forks.
TFS converting to Git/Azure DevOps here. Be the change you want to see in the world! There's a chance that some of the people in your org that don't use TFS could use the organizational tools built into GitHub/GitLab/BitBucket/DevOps. If you get enough teams on board with that platform that also happens to use Git, then you can make that push to IT!
My company has way more than 6,000 devs and each dev creates a git repo as part of our onboarding process and uploads it to our centralized git tool (you create and push a mostly empty test repo as part of the basic training). Just from that, I'd imagine my company has tens of thousands of git repos, although a lot of them probably only have a single file or some random throwaway code.
The number of git repos might look big but without knowing more, the content of most of those repos could be a complete nothingburger. Number of git repos is pretty meaningless metric, IMO.
Note it doesn't say unique git repositories. It could just mean each employee's fork is included in that count, which would inflate the number like that.
It s already the case and actually a big fight we re having (company of 70k employees spread everywhere) because we cant reverse engineer our upstream and downstream systems and it leads to huge bottlenecks trying to understand them when issues arise, as we need other teams etc.
Many of those companies still have a few (not always skilled) IT people with access to everything! And they sometimes make it easy for themselves by putting themselves in 2FA exception groups etc.
Will depend on company back when I worked for British Telecom, some team leaders with wide access to code & data on some projects had to go through Developed Vetting (TS clearance).
Back in the mid 90's there was a issue in Scotland when a well known journalist got a job in a call center and looked up the private telephone numbers for the Queen.
Am I the only one a bit disappointed by the gross earnings for the top 5 earners given how much the media has ben hyping the money made by e-gamers. For some reason I would have thought they would make more money over 2 years. Top earner was grossing $ 9.6M ($4.8M/yr), 10th was $2.9M($1.4M/yr), at 81 you drop below $1M (500k/yr) on twitch pre-tax revenue. After 81 you drop below the %1M over two years threshold.
Actually the more I think about it - that does seem like a lot if you add in their other rev from youtube channels and other compensation. I understand why all the pro players started working on their twitch stream content more than winning competitions. More stable business and viewer base.
A lot of those streamers are pretty open about how twitch revenue is a small portion of their earnings.
Ninja was famously paid $1MM for an 8 hour ad of playing Apex at launch.
I've had private conversation with large streaming friends that have all said independently that the amount they get paid from a short Raid Shadow Legends ad is huge. One said it's enough to buy a nice car, and if they hit their target downloads (w/ link) the number jumps up to enough to buy multiple nice cars.
There is a lot of big money for streamers, not just big streamers.
I saw a thread on twitter as part of this leak that showed chat of a streamer turning down around $1.6 million a month to advertise a gambling website, because another one was paying more.
I'm not surprised by any of this. If you ever did any digging in to how much advertising pays, ran numbers on twitch subs, etc, these numbers match that quite closely.
Number 1 is Critical Roll. Their website lists 24 employees (many of whom are professional actors), and I’m sure there’s more behind the scenes. Salaries add up quickly.
I'm pretty sure that Critical Role isn't the main income for most people.
Also: 4.8M/24 people is still 200k per head. Even if you assume that various costs take 50% of the revenue, they're all still making 6 figures for a thing that's pretty much a side hustle for most of them.
Let's say payroll is half their total costs. Payroll taxes plus income taxes works out to somewhere around 40-60% of the remaining amount. Health insurance is probably in the 10% range per year, leaving them with a $50k salary. Costs are not, of course, quite that high.
As a point of comparison, a talented voice actor can gross around $125k per year, working from home as a freelancer. I don't feel that the Critical Roll actors are being overcompensated at all.
You think an assistant is being paid same as busy TV actors? :)
The most amazing Critical Role fact might be its creation was indirectly financed by Youtube/Google :o. Felicia Day knew all of those guys and about their private DnD game, she invited them to film few episodes for her YT channel "Geek & Sundry". Channel started with $1Mil advance from YouTube Original Channel Initiative, one of the rare if brief successes.
That works out to $200k/year for each employee, which after you account for benefits is a solid middle class income, assuming they don't live in downtown San Francisco or something.
The traditional distribution of social classes historically was something like 90%+ working+lower classes (farmers/craftsmen/factory workers/service jobs/soldiers/etc) 9% middle class (merchants, doctors, lawyers, officers, scholars, managers) and 1% or so of upper class (landlords, aristocracy and capitalists; CEOs and politicians). Middle class grew much larger in mid-20th century USA, exceeding 50% but perhaps that's just a temporary situation that's now reversing as the inequity has been significantly increasing in the last 50 years or so and it looks like in the future middle class might be a minority forever - IIRC current stats would be something like 1-2% of upper class, 45% middle class, and the remaining 53% or so working+lower classes.
If you look at social class stratification, the general assumption is that if you have to work a job for your income, you're not upper class, you're serving in the employment of the upper class. If you have a high paying job, that's defined as "upper middle" social class at least until you have accumulated wealth to transition to a capitalist/owner/investor role (as some popular musicians and athletes do); being in the top 4% of earners is quite reasonable for traditional upper middle class roles e.g. independent lawyers and doctors, which also tend to earn 200k+/year in USA.
It's among the top 4% of income, that's an objective metric. Being in the top 4% of people in one of the wealthiest countries in the world is objectively not middle class.
I don't think you've been keeping up with home prices and insurance costs around the country. $100k take home isn't all that anymore. You're not food stamp poor, but it's easy to be house poor at that income level, especially if you're shooting for a better school district. Health insurance costs eat up so much of that it is not funny, even if you are healthy. If you or someone in your family comes down with an expensive medical condition you'll be in real trouble.
True, these people are all self employed, so insurance costs would be pretty large. If you're making 200k I'd still say you've probably got at least 100 left over after taxes and insurance. That affords you a 600k house using the 30% of income rule if you can get the down payment together.
That is literally the top earner in the community made up by a team of people.
The media/VC etc community has been hyping e-gaming as the new sports domain. That said the top salary for a sports player is $168M / year for one player (Lionel Messi) and number 99 is $35M/year (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_sports_contrac...)
It really shows how much of a step change there is between the sports & e-sports and I would be curious how much of this Twitch is keeping to themselves instead of paying out.
Not to mention how much uptime e-gamers have to put in.
Also good to note that most streamers have a side donation system that more then likely isn’t included in these numbers. Donations seem to be generally run through a non twitch third party site. And is probably a substantial increase if not a doubling of their income.
Before commenting on how much revenue this seems to be for the streamer, remember that most streamers hire and maintain staff. Preach Gaming, for example, has 6 full time staff. Angry Joe is somewhere around 8. Critical Roll’s website lists 24 employees, plus more who are likely not credited.
If you squint a bit, that's not that far off of niche pro athlete money (especially given that the bottom end doesn't have the same discrete threshold that pro sports do). Per [0] the best-paid NHL players are making ~$10M/year, and I would expect the NHL to be more efficiently monetized than internet streamers (we know that making money as "talent" on the internet is a tough proposition).
> PS: Make sure to change your Twitch (and possibly Prime) password. Twitch is already prompting users to do so based on Reddit posts.
This is not worth worrying about. If Twitch is making you reset your password, that means you don’t need to hurry because they’ve already locked your account. If your password hash leaked, the important thing isn’t Twitch, it’s every other place you used the same password.
There are downsides to asking people to change their password for everything! (even though this is a big "everything")
I remember some services send you a message telling you to change your password anytime a new device logs in or even fails to login to your account. That causes most people to pick weaker passwords, since they're not all using manager apps.
Cry? Realistically speaking, this isn't going to happen without physical access to your computer or malware, though. So don't leave your computer unattended and don't download sketchy things.
Expecting people to simply memorize a unique, strong password for every single website that they use is unrealistic. Of course, no solution is perfect, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't improve the current situation of people reusing passwords with maybe slight modifications per website.
Outside of the same authentication domain with bad auth token practices (windows) the hash almost always is useless elsewhere. Salting increases the complexity and thus size of hash tables or hash comparison (rainbow tables), but if your manage to break or brute force the entries, salted or not, the secret often is reused by many users.
That's not what salting does, and different hashing methods are irrelevant. The danger of having your hash leaked is that it can be cracked and the plaintext password recovered. The hash itself is entirely useless for logging into other services.
If this is a phrase to unlock a bitcoin account with 1000 bitcoins in it, then you can easily convince people to try and brute force it.
Do you have Amouranth's or xQcOW's salted hash from this leak? Might be worth trying to brute force it.
You try on those kinds of accounts because they might have re-used it or the password might be patterned or not completely random, which gives you a chance that the credential might give you access elsewhere.
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.)
Depends on your local legislations, but be careful that by default on torrents you are also sharing those files to others so you are also distributing stolen material, so it may have an impact on your potential "crime".
I saw the payout pastebin, but i'm very curious what the amazon vs stream cut is for sub revenue in particular. This is the key thing steamers negotiate with twitch over, and is covered by the nda.
rumor was recently negotiations have been very cut and dry for newer big/up and coming streamers basically being told to take some algorithmically assigned cut or give up partner status.
Top 10k Streamers by Revenue: https://pastebin.com/LjmaPNam
Contains the following data points:
'ad_share_gross', 'sub_share_gross', 'bits_share_gross', 'bits_developer_share_gross', 'bits_extension_share_gross', 'prime_sub_share_gross', 'bit_share_ad_gross', 'fuel_rev_gross', 'bb_rev_gross'
(TTS donations, 3rd party revenue like OnlyFans, Patreon, Amazon Gifts and sponsorship deals... are not included)
Total gross payout in the leak (2019/8 to 2021/10) was 4.2 billion dollars across 344k users. (based on data points above alone but could be wrong since it's annons on 4chan.)
PS: Make sure to change your Twitch (and possibly Prime) password. Twitch is already prompting users to do so based on Reddit posts.