Making money on Twitch

By Jonah Cohen, April 14th, 2021

Twitch is a live streaming platform that mainly is used to broadcast live gameplay of video games. Most people stream just for fun, but there are ways to make money on Twitch. One of the ways to start making money is to become a Twitch affiliate. To become a Twitch affiliate you need to be at 50 followers, have streamed for 8 hours, have streamed on 7 different days, and have averaged 3 viewers, all within 30 days. After reaching that goal, you can put in your financial information so Twitch can pay you, and then you are a Twitch affiliate.

As a Twitch affiliate, you are able to monetize your stream. A Twitch affiliate’s main source of revenue is from bits and subscriptions. Each bit is worth 1 cent. Viewers buy bits from Twitch, then give bits to streamers. Subscriptions cost 5 dollars to subscribe at tier 1. Money from subscriptions are split 50/50 between Twitch affiliates and Twitch. There are also tier 2 and 3 subscription options. Each different subscription tier gives the subscriber access to custom channel specific emotes, which they can use anywhere on Twitch.

Twitch affiliates also now have the ability to make money from ads on Twitch. Ads don’t make Twitch affiliates a lot of money. I personally make about .1 cents for each live view on my stream. That is very little. That means you need about 10 live views on a stream to make 1 cent. Ads are played for each person who enters the stream and when you tell Twitch to run ads. Even bigger streamers don’t make enough money from ads to sustain their life.

There are ways to make money on Twitch that Twitch doesn’t provide. These are tips/donations, and sponsorships. Tips/donations are when streamers have a link in their channel that enables viewers to send money directly to the streamer. Sponsorships are when a company makes a deal with a streamer to pay the streamer for promoting the company's product. Most Twitch sponsorships are an hourly rate from anywhere between 1 cent to 1 dollar per viewer. These sponsorships could be any company who is interested in having their product promoted. These are much more rare for smaller streamers to receive.

All of this seems great and easy. With the work, Twitch streaming can easily be a hobby that supports itself. However making it a legitimate job is rare. After affiliate, there is the level of Twitch partner. The only monetary advantage of this is a different amount of money from ads, which is negotiated in the partnership agreement. Not even that guarantees that you will be able to stream as a full time job. Most “full time streamers” are also creating content on other platforms as part of their income. This gives you a better chance to make it full time, but a .01 percent chance when doubled is still .02 percent.

When making money on Twitch, the odds are stacked against Twitch affiliates. It takes viewers to make money. Next time I will share how to actually get viewers so you can make some money.