Poll of the Day > How much does the average streamer make?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I guess how much per viewer is a better question

I think streamers make money from ads but they also get donations during their streams, plus monthly subscriptions make them money also

"Average"? Functionally nothing. The vast, vast majority of people that try streaming never grab enough of an audience to make a meaningful amount of money. Unless you already have some degree of celebrity status going in, it's ferociously unlikely that you'll be able to take off.

Average? Piss fuck all.

The median streamer makes negative money; Nothing from the service minus however much you value your own time.

As others have said, most streamers probably just get the pleasure of talking to a few friends while they stream whatever they stream and probably never even make enough to cover the costs of streaming. If you mean the average of people who earn enough streaming that it becomes their full time job. Then it suddenly skews a lot higher. Because you are starting at a base of people who are successful.

Nah. Im not good enough at anything to just stream without interacting with people and still pull an audience. And im not interested in interacting with chats 99% of the time.

TheFalseDeity posted...

Im not good enough at anything to just stream without interacting with people and still pull an audience.

By and large, even people that are really good at the games they stream don't attract much of an audience if they don't interact with them. Most of the appeal of streaming is the parasocial relationship with the streamer: feeling like you're hanging out with a friend who's playing the game and chatting with you while they do it. Without that chat, you might as well just watch clips of the interesting parts on Youtube instead of sitting through the whole stream.

The average streamer is not monetized at all. The numbers I just found indicate 72.8% of Twitch streamers make nothing at all, and a further 15.2% make $25 a month or less. Presumably other services have similar breakdowns.

"Average"? Literally nothing.

If you even make minimum wage while streaming, you are not just in the top 1% of streamers, but the top 1% *of* the top 1%.

In other words streaming is for fun and if you can make a career out of it, great, but don't count on it.

willythemailboy posted...

The average streamer is not monetized at all. The numbers I just found indicate 72.8% of Twitch streamers make nothing at all, and a further 15.2% make $25 a month or less. Presumably other services have similar breakdowns.

Which means that even if you only use the monetized ones to determine the average, the median is <$25 a month (15.2% is more than half of the 27.2% that make more than nothing). Now, those figures don't indicate how much time each of those people spend streaming in a given month, so they don't necessarily give an indication of how much you get per viewer or per hour, but they still pretty unambiguously indicate that you shouldn't bank on streaming being a significant income source.

adjl posted...

By and large, even people that are really good at the games they stream don't attract much of an audience if they don't interact with them. Most of the appeal of streaming is the parasocial relationship with the streamer: feeling like you're hanging out with a friend who's playing the game and chatting with you while they do it. Without that chat, you might as well just watch clips of the interesting parts on Youtube instead of sitting through the whole stream.

Yeah would never expect to make anywhere near a living off of it. But if you could get any kind of money for doing what you were going to anyways itd be a free bonus.

I don't have tits so I'd never be able to make a living out of it.

Honestly, 99% of streamers would be better off collecting unemployment benefits

I am a streamer. My friends and I get together and stream bad games and laugh at them.

We make no money off of this. Our viewership is less than 10 and it's pretty much entirely people we were friends with prior to streaming.

Still it's a lot of fun.

As for if I'd be an online streamer as a job, no. But I do stream for fun, and to record myself...

Never in my life would I do that. I had a friend who almost mentally broke herself trying to get into the streaming business, it was awful to see such a happy person become so miserable and depressed.

If by "average" you mean, the endless amount of people trying to make it their career, but are unable to get any significant amount of views, or build an audience, I'd say a mass majority of them, like over 99% of them, are losing money by streaming, when time and cost of creating content is considered.

I would say, like "movie star" was the dream job of many young people in the past, that has mostly been replaced with "content creator".

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I don't have tits so I'd never be able to make a living out of it.

Unless you become a V-tuber.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9s1Dw9WSn34

ForteEXE3850 posted...

I would say, like "movie star" was the dream job of many young people in the past, that has mostly been replaced with "content creator".

With "Movie Star" the goal was unattainable because of scarcity and the "gated community" nature of Hollywood. "Content Creator" is attainable, but not lucrative because of over saturation.