In 2007 Justin Kan, Emmett Shear, Michael Seibel and Kyle Vogt launched Justin.tv, an online service that allowed anyone to broadcast videos online. Originally the only channel on the site was a 24/7 broadcast of Justin Kan’s life, something which generated the term ‘lifecasting’.
Fortunately the site expanded beyond that incredibly boring premise to include all sorts of broadcasts, the most popular of which quickly became gaming broadcasts. Within four years the popularity of game footage broadcasts was so high that the creators of Justin.tv launched a spin-off site specifically dedicated to gaming.
That spin-off site was called Twitch and since launching on June 6th, 2011 has become a staple of the modern entertainment industry. Every day millions of people log in to Twitch to watch their favourite content creators play Call of Duty, review gameplay of other streamers and play real money online slots.
For streamers in Twitch’s Top 100, the financial rewards can be enormous, with every creator in that list making a minimum of $32,850 a month. But what about streamers outside of that elite group? Is Twitch streaming a legitimate business opportunity? Could your love of video games translate to a lucrative job carrying out your hobby? Read on to find out.
The Essentials
Making money on Twitch isn’t as simple as creating an account, playing a couple of hours a day and watching the cash pile up. It’s complicated and difficult and to start making real cash you’ll first need to become a Twitch Affiliate.
To become one of those you’ll need to meet the following criteria:
- Have at least 500 total minutes broadcast in the last 30 days
- Have at least seven unique broadcast days in the previous 30 days
- Average three concurrent viewers or more over the last 30 days
- Have a minimum of 50 followers
If you don’t match that criteria, you can still make money from donations, but monetization through advertising will be impossible. After that the next step is to become a Twitch Partner, which is a title you must apply for and comes with its own set of unique criteria which are:
- Record of streaming at least five hours consecutively on 12 separate days in the last 30 days
- A growing audience
- An average of 75 viewers or more
If you get accepted as a Twitch Partner you’ll have way more autonomy over your monetization options and greater tools available to build your audience. But what about…?
The Revenues
The way that you’ll start to make serious money on Twitch is through ad revenues. Yes, donations can often be lucrative but they’re not a sure-fire thing and you might end up with a very stingy audience anyway, so ads should be your main concern.
Twitch pays its streamers according to their Cost Per Thousand (CPM) model which provides a fixed rate for every 1,000 views of an ad on their channel. This rate is subject to change though and varies depending on the type of advert, the time of year its broadcast and where in the world the viewers are.
There are two other ad revenue models on Twitch that are available for affiliates and partners, the first of which is the Ads Incentive Program (AIP) that offers specific payouts for streamers who agree to a certain amount of hours and ad density a week.
Then there is the percentage based revenue model that pays streamers 55 per cent of the revenue for each ad that runs on their stream; this option is only available to partners.
Money. Tell Me About Money!
Okay, now we’ve discussed how to become an affiliate and a partner as well as briefly covering the various advertising models on Twitch, let’s get down to our last and most important question of the piece – how much money can you make from Twitch streaming.
Well, there’s no concrete figure that we can give you as revenues vary from person to person, but on average, if you have a viewer engagement rate of 50 per cent, you can earn $1.29 to £2.14 per 1,000 views on an advert. Which isn’t really a lot of money, especially when you consider how hard it is to get 100 viewers, let alone 1,000.
Twitch: Is it Worth it?
If you have ambition to be the best and faith in your ability to do that then yes, absolutely. It is something you need to go into with your eyes fully open though. We discussed earlier that the Top 100 streamers earn a minimum of $32,850 a month.
If you take that number down to the Top 10,000 then the figure drops dramatically to $935, which is about $4,000 less than the average monthly salary in the USA, and probably works out at more hours than most jobs too.
So before you go quitting your job and declaring yourself as the next NickMercs, have a serious think.
