Top 10 Twitch Streamer Reveals How Much They Make From Donations, Ads, Subs And Sponsorships

It’s no secret that the top Twitch streamers, such as Ninja and Shroud, make bank from playing games and broadcasting their antics. What remains a mystery is how much they’re making. Yesterday, popular Hearthstone streamer Disguised Toast decided to pull back the curtain by not only showing his average income, but using his figures to extrapolate the earnings of other top streamers.

Over the course of a 10-minute video, Disguised Toast breaks down the four main revenue sources for streamers — donations, ads, subscriptions and sponsorships. Having been in the top ten of Twitch streamers with over 1.2 million hours watched, you can be sure Toast knows what he’s talking about.

For Toast, donations make up the smallest part of his income, bringing in $2500 (about £1900) per month. Which is a decent amount of coin… but only a bit over half of what he gets from advertisements — $4000 (about £3,050). Toast notes this could potentially be more, if he used a special “show ad” button available to partner streamers.

Next up is subscriptions. Normally, 50 per cent of this goes to Twitch, but top streamers get a better deal of 70/30. With 4000 subscribers, Toast gets around $US14,000 (about £10,670) per month here.

For comparison, Ninja gets around $423,500 (about £322,700) from his 121,000 subs. Per month.

Image: Disguised Toast

The final source is sponsored streams, usually marked with the “#ads” or “#sponsored” hashtags. Depending on the streamer and game, this can bring in $0.01 to $1 per viewer, per hour — so, anywhere from $100 (£76) to $10,000 (£7620).

I’m guessing by now you’re wondering “What the hell am I doing with my life? I should just start streaming!” Obviously, it’s a lot more complicated and harder than that. At the very least, it’s an extremely eye-opening, and one might say brave, video — even Toast’s friends and colleagues warned him off making. [YouTube]

This post originally appeared on Kotaku Australia