Actually, very few people are earning a living wage according to this data. There are a handful of people making millions but it quickly drops off.
The 1000th highest earner on Twitch is making like $5,000/month or $60,000/year, which is a good salary in the US but nothing crazy.
The 2000th highest earner is making roughly half that so $30,000/year. That’s about the average salary in the US.
The 3000th highest earner is making about half that again so $15,000/year. That’s poverty wages in the US.
There are over a million people on Twitch. If you’re not in the top 2000, forget it. About two-thirds of the people on Twitch are getting NOTHING. I don’t mean low amounts, I mean literally $0. The people at the very bottom actually have negative earnings. What does that even mean? They’re doing so poorly that they actually owe Twitch money?
Prominent news outlets like EuroGamer, or whatever it is, are claiming that women are being paid significantly less than men. Obviously, this is all just based on subscriber numbers and whatnot but it seems that women are doing worse than men. That may be surprising to some people.
Let’s look at a couple of random accounts. For privacy reasons, I’ll call this person E Plays. No, that’s too obvious. Let’s say Erin P.
The spreadsheet breaks the earnings down based on ads, subscribers, bits, and Prime subscribers. I think that I know what all of this means. Ads are the ads that get shown in the streams. Subscribers are when people renew their subscription. It’s like $5/month or something. Bits are just straight up, “Here’s some money.” And Prime subscribers are something to do with Amazon. If you get Amazon Prime, which gives you free shipping and whatnot, you’re also given two free Twitch subscriptions a month.
So I looked at the data for 2020. That’s the only full calendar year that’s included in this leak. And when you combine these various sources of Twitch income, Erin made about $6,900.
We can look at Mike M now. He made about $40,000. I wasn’t sure that I was doing this right but this seems to accord with figures that were published of the top Twitch earners which showed that Mike made $97,000 over the course of the two years and three months in this data.
It’s not nearly as much as I thought. But at $40,000, it definitely puts him as one of the highest earners on Twitch.
This is not a money maker. Go get a job in any office and after the normal promotions and whatnot you’ll make more money than this in just a few years.
Erin is actually doing better than I thought but $6,900/year is not something that you can live on. Add the $1,700/year that she gets from Youtube (according to Social Blade) and you’re still only at $8,600/year. She’s also on Patreon but nobody goes there. It’s ShiShi and two other people.
When I was in college, I delivered pizza one day a week. I made about $150/day. So per year, that would be $7,200.
A one day a week job delivering pizza, that I did in college, pays almost as much as what Erin is getting. And this was like 20 years ago so adjusted for inflation, I was making more money than Erin is. For working one day a week.
Maybe Erin can consider a career as a pizza delivery driver. Although, I don’t think that pizza delivery is quite the profession that it was back in the day, what with Uber and the like driving down wages. Also, it depends on your location. I don’t know how busy the pizzarias in rural Pennsylvania are.
This is never going to become remotely profitable for Erin. Do it as a hobby. Go get a job like a normal person. Erin is never going to get in the top 2000 of Twitch to earn that sweet $30,000/year. Had she just stayed in the fucking record store, she’d be making at least that much as a manager.
She thought that she was going to be the next Belle Delphine. How deluded does she have to be to believe that?
Erin is an average-looking woman in her mid-30s who has negative charisma and has absolutely no knowledge of video games or experience with video games or skill at video games. But she’s going to make a fortune streaming video games? It’s complete madness. Why did nobody intervene? Why did nobody say, “Hey. This is insane. Don’t do it. It’s not going to work.”
I’ve been saying it for years. So I’ve done my part. But what about anybody close to her? Where the fuck are her parents? Why didn’t they warn her?
I appreciate not wanting to crush somebody’s dreams but it’s a total farce. How can anybody believe that somebody with no experience with video games is going to make money from playing video games? Just state the obvious. “Why are you getting into video games, Erin? Are you sure that this is going to be a profitable venture? Because it doesn’t seem like this is a good idea to me.”
That’s all that her parents had to say. I know that they probably don’t know all the ins and outs of Twitch and what it takes to be successful there (be a smoking hot chick and/or be charismatic and/or be good at video games) but they must have had an inkling that this not going to work. She never fucking played a video game before. That wasn’t a red flag that this isn’t going to work?
What if she wanted to be a country music star, having never sung or played an instrument before and not even liking country music? Would her parents have intervened then? It’s the exact same fucking thing. It’s completely insane. How did she think that this was ever going to work?
Frankly, it’s remarkable that she’s even getting $6,900/year. So kudos to that, I guess. But in terms of making money, in terms of being able to support yourself like a normal adult, this was a total disaster. It’s a monumentally stupid decision. She left a normal job for this ridiculous bullshit.