Twitch: How Gamers Make Money on Twitch?

They don’t have a job, they don’t have a business. They play games hour after hour but who pay their bills? How do they afford to live by broadcasting some video games? What kind of people would pay someone for watching game shows?

These kinds of questions often used to visit my mind. So I decided to dig in and find out how the Twitch gamers make money and here is what I have found.

Twitch: An interactive platform for gaming

Twitch officially started its journey as Twitch.tv in June, 2011.Before it was known as Justin.tv as one of the two owners of Justin.tv was Justin Kan, so Twitch was named after him. Another owner of Justin.tv or Twitch was Emmett Shear.After Amazon took over the control of Justin.tv in 2011, it was named as Twitch.

I am not willing to draw a lesson on Twitch’s history today because I am mainly writing this blog to explain how Twitch gamers make money. But before explaining that I thought it was necessary to give a brief introduction about Twitch.

So ever since 2011 Twitch is known as the most popular game streaming website of the world. It is a platform where someone can play games and broadcast his or her gameplay for the live audience. Other than broadcasting live game shows, gamers also upload videos about their personal life and gaming in Twitch.tv. So Twitch.tv not only works as a gaming platform but also as a video sharing platform.

How the twitch gamers make money

Well, it may sound like a million dollar question to people who haven’t heard so much about Twitch that, how the Twitch gamers make money??But I am going to answer this question to you in a very simple way.

There are mainly three different ways by which gamers can earn money from Twitch. These are Twitch affiliate program, Twitch partnership program and donation. I am going to briefly explain about these ways in here.

Twitch Affiliate Program

Gamers can earn money from the followings ways after signing up for Twitch affiliate program:

Accepting subscription
The Twitch gamers can earn money from Twitch affiliate program by accepting subscription from their viewers. Twitch has four subscription plans for its viewers which are $4.99, $9.99, $24.99 and Twitch Prime subscription plan.

Earning from Bits
Other than accepting subscription plans Twitch gamers can also earn money by enabling bits on their channel. Now you may ask that what is a bits?? Well, the bits are actually kind of emoji like stuffs that you can use in a chat to express your reaction to gamers. If you use bits in some gamer’s channel then he or she will get paid for it.

Selling games from own channel

Twitch gamers can sell games from their own channel and in return they can earn 5% of the revenue made from those sells. But how the Twitch gamers can make a sell form their channel??

Well, the answer is very simple. Twitch gamers have some audiences that visit their page and in this opportunity twitch gamers can promote some video games by putting some banners or other promo materials in their channels. By clicking on those banners or promo materials if someone buys a game then the gamer get awarded with 5% revenue from that sell.

Twitch Partnership Program

Twitch partnership program is actually not very different from Twitch affiliate program. It includes all the options by which a Twitch affiliate gamer can make money plus it includes the option to earn money by putting ads on a channel. But not everyone gets to qualify for the Twitch partnership program. According to Twitch to qualify for the Twitch partnership program a gamer has to prove himself or herself as the role model for the whole Twitch gaming community.

Donation from fans and audience

So far we have talked about two ordinary ways of making money from Twitch. But now we are going to talk about the real deal. Of course, affiliate program and partnership program are two effective ways to make money from Twitch platform. But actually most of the gamers don’t get to earn much from those two programs. The gamers make most of the money from donation in Twitch. The responsibility for collecting and receiving donations on Twitch platform solely depends on the gamers. Twitch will never help a gamer or show any way for receiving donation.

But if a gamer want to raise money from his or her audience then Twitch also won’t restrict it. As a result, the Twitch gamers often choose to collect money from their fans and audience by putting a link to their paypal account or donation website etc. in their channel.

Female Gamers Controversy of Twitch

The Twitch platform users and the gamers often get engaged in debate about the female gamers of Twitch. It is often said that the female gamers always attract more audience than the male gamers. The female gamers often try to manipulate the audience for donation. They try to seduce their fan and take advantage of them.

There are some male gamers who sometimes argue that the female gamers are ruining the ground for competition in Twitch by deceiving people with their makeup and outlook. Although, some of the facts they argue about the female gamers might be true still there are a lot of successful male gamers in Twitch who proved that the appearance and sexism is not all that matters in Twitch. They say that to become a successful game streamer one should mainly focus on putting a good show for the audience instead of focusing on their sex and outlook.