Do you want to learn how to earn money on Twitch?
Twitch is the largest streaming platform in the world. They receive more than 100 billion minutes of viewing each year, and the majority of their content consists of creators playing video games.
As a streamer, you are probably wondering what is the best possible way to get paid. Fortunately, there are plenty of solutions.
In this post, you will learn the best ways to make money streaming on Twitch.
Let’s start:
A Quick Word on Twitch Revenue Stream Terminology
Before we get to our list of the best ways to make money on Twitch, let’s talk about some of the terms you’ll see below.
In particular, let’s discuss «Twitch Partner» and «Twitch Affiliate» and how they differ.
Both allow Twitch streamers to generate revenue from the platform through subscriptions, Twitch ads, and Bits (more on that later).
However, each program has its own set of advantages and disadvantages.
For example, it is much easier to join the Twitch Affiliate Program than it is to become a Twitch Partner. However, Twitch partners have several benefits.
Here are the biggest differences between these two programs:
- Twitch covers partner payment fees. Affiliates must cover these fees themselves.
- Members can create up to 60 unlockable secondary emotes*. Affiliates can only create 5.
- Members have access to custom cheermotes** for Twitch bits.
- Twitch only stores VOD*** for up to 14 days for affiliates. VOD storage lasts up to 60 days for partners.
- Twitch partners have full transcode options**** available. Affiliate transcoding options are offered as available based on viewers’ devices and locations during live streams.
- Members can increase the transmission delay ***** by up to 15 minutes.
- Twitch Affiliates cannot create Streaming Teams.
* Secondary emotes are special emotes that Twitch viewers can use in the chat section during live streams.
**Cheermotes are a different type of custom emote. These are tied to Bits, which Twitch users can pay to «boost» their favorite streamers. Bits come in packages, such as 1 or 10,000. As secondary emotes, each pack has its own emoticon («cheermote») created by the creator of Twitch himself.
*** VOD stands for «Video on Demand». When a live stream ends, it is uploaded as «VOD» to a streamer’s Twitch channel. VODs are not broadcast live, so viewers can watch them while they are available.
**** Transcode options are the resolutions that viewers can switch to during live streams, such as 480p, 720p, etc.
***** Stream latency is the amount of time between when a streamer says or does something in real life and when viewers actually see it on stream.
How to make money on Twitch
- twitch subscriptions
- Earn Ad Revenue
- affiliate marketing
- brand sponsorships
- Accept bits during live streams
- Accept donations during streams
- sell the goods
- Upload clips to third-party platforms
- Create or join a broadcast team
- Join an esports team
1. Twitch Subscriptions
Twitch viewers can watch your channel for free, which will allow them to receive notifications when you’re live, or they can support you by subscribing to your channel.
Subscriptions are one of the most common ways streamers can earn money on Twitch.
They come in three subscription levels: Level 1 for $4.99/month, Level 2 for $9.99/month, and Level 3 for $24.99/month.
And because Amazon owns Twitch, Amazon Prime subscribers get access to 1 free Twitch subscription per month.
Viewers can also save by subscribing for more than one month at a time. 3-month subscriptions are 10% off, while 6-month subscriptions are 15% off.
Twitch accepts a 50/50 cut off of subscriptions and your minimum payout balance is $50.
This means that you must receive 20 Tier 1 signups to receive a payment from the platform.
All subscribers enjoy the following benefits, regardless of their subscription level:
- Sub-badges. They upgrade to different loyalty badges when subscribers stay subscribed for 3 months, 6 months, 1 year and 2 years in a row.
- Ad-free viewing.
- Streams for subscribers only.
- Access to sub-solo chat mode.
- Only secondary emoticons.
Secondary gestures are custom. Twitch creators must create them themselves or hire graphic designers to create them for them.
Viewers only have access to secondary emotes from the creators they are subscribed to, but can use secondary emotes they have access to on all Twitch live streams.
Tier 2 and 3 memberships have improved secondary badges and come with exclusive secondary emotes.
Level 2 and 3 subscribers can also modify emotes by flipping them horizontally or attaching sunglasses to them.
Finally, Twitch subscriptions offer a unique way to keep your audience engaged. You can do this by enabling subscription goals and «Twitch Alerts».
Secondary goals help you and your audience keep track of how many new subscribers you’re getting. You can show the progress in the chat and on the screen.
Some creators even tie benefits to each milestone, like promising a karaoke stream for reaching 100 subscribers, participating in a social media challenge for 200 subscribers, revealing your face for 500 subscribers if you don’t use a camera, etc.
Twitch Alerts are on-screen animations that appear when you get a new subscriber, subscription, or bit.
You can enable them with a tool like Streamlabs.
How to Become a Twitch Partner or Affiliate
To get Twitch subscribers, you must be an affiliate or partner.
To become a Twitch Affiliate, you must meet the following requirements:
- Stream at least 500 minutes in the last 30 days.
- Broadcast on 7 different days in the last 30 days.
- Get an average of 3 concurrent viewers during live streams in the last 30 days.
- Have at least 30 followers.
The Twitch Partner Program does not have a fixed number of requirements. Requests are considered on a case-by-case basis.
In general, you need to upgrade your Twitch Affiliate status by completing the Path to Partnership achievement to unlock the Apply button on your dashboard.
This requires that you have streamed for at least 25 hours, stream on 12 different days, and maintain an average of 75 concurrent viewers per stream.
Acceptance into the program, however, depends on several different factors.
These include the average number of concurrent viewers, the type of content you create, the frequency of your streaming, and even how many followers you have on other platforms.
Twitch wants to see channels that get 80 viewers per stream or more, create great content, and stream at least three days a week.
Once you feel confident in your numbers, you can apply to join the affiliate program.
Twitch recommends that you wait at least 30 days before reapplying if you are not accepted.
2. Earn income advertising
As Twitch is struggling to remain profitable amid competition from other streaming platforms, their approach to revenue sharing changes quite a bit.
This includes the amount of money streamers can earn from ads.
Here are the current policies: You must be a Twitch Affiliate or Partner to generate ad revenue.
You’ll earn 30% of the ad revenue generated for every ad view your content receives.
However, if you go to your ad management panel and adjust your settings so that 3 minutes or more of ads are served every hour you stream, you’ll get a 55% revenue cut.
Adjust the settings up to the «Density of your ads» setting. say «3 minutes/hour» or more.
Some partners may earn additional advertising revenue through the Advertising Incentive Program.
As Twitch says…
“The Advertising Incentive Program gives creators the option to earn a steady and reliable monthly advertising revenue. This program is built on top of Ads Manager, using built-in ad timing and automation designed to ease the burden of managing ad delivery.”
This program is only available to members and by invitation only.
You will receive a different offer each month if you are eligible. It is displayed as a banner at the top of the Ads Manager panel.
The offers you receive are fixed payments that you can earn by meeting the requirements of the chosen offer, such as earning at least $500 in ad revenue in a month, running 4 minutes of ads per hour, and streaming for just over 40 hours that month.
The exact value of the offers. you What you get depends on the size of your Twitch audience from recent streams, where you are, and the number of hours you’ve streamed lately.
3. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is one of the ways to generate income online, but it is primarily an effective monetization strategy for many Twitch streamers.
This is due to the excessive cuts that Twitch takes from its creators.
On Twitch, get 30-55% off ad revenue and 50% off subscriptions. By comparison, YouTube pays a flat fee of 55% as long as you are part of the YouTube Partner Program.
With affiliate marketing, you can start earning money even if you are not a Twitch affiliate or partner.
This is because affiliate marketing allows you to generate income through affiliate links – special URLs that are assigned to you by a business.
By promoting that company’s product or service with a CTA linked to your special affiliate URL, you can earn an affiliate commission every time one of your viewers clicks on that link and makes a purchase.
Twitch streamers promote affiliate products in-stream, on their channel page, in the chat section of their live streams (using automated Twitch bots like Nightbot and Moobot), and through third-party platforms like Instagram and Twitter.
Many streamers place banner ads in their About sections for affiliate products, including products or brands that power their streams (Intel, ASUS, Alienware, etc.).
Most affiliate programs offer commissions between 5 and 30%, although some pay outside of this range.
Try joining affiliate programs that match your audience and the general Twitch audience. This allows you to increase your earning potential with affiliate marketing.
The fashion industry has the largest number of affiliate programs, but common affiliate programs for Twitch streamers include GameStop, Go2Games, Green Man Gaming, Amazon, Nerd or Die, Newegg, Razer, and XSplit.
4. Brand sponsorships
When looking for how to make money on Twitch, sponsorships come up quite often, and for good reason too.
Paid brand endorsements are one of the best ways to get more money for your broadcast efforts.
It works like this: you negotiate a deal with a brand. They pay you a one-time lump sum in exchange for mentioning or using their product in your stream.
One of the biggest examples of this is Twitch streamer Ninja Electronic Arts (EA) paid him $1 million to play Apex Legends and tweet about it when it was first released.
Ninja had 13 million followers on Twitch and received hundreds of thousands of simultaneous views at that point, which is an important point that we want to make about sponsorships.
Your ability to be sponsored depends on a number of factors.
Yes, the number of followers and concurrent views you get are important, but so is the content you create, the community you’ve built, and the engagement rates your channel generates.
Sponsors will also consider following you on other platforms.
Fortunately, another key factor that determines your likelihood of being sponsored is how well you can sell.
This means that you can get sponsored as soon as you can prove yourself to a potential sponsor, a feat that even the smallest streamers can achieve.
To strengthen your negotiating efforts, include a media kit as a PDF file in your initial message to a potential sponsor.
This equipment must include:
- It handles all the social media accounts you are active on.
- Analytics for your Twitch channel, including how many followers you have and how many views you get per stream.
- An overview of your broadcast schedule.
- A breakdown of your channel’s demographics to demonstrate whether or not your audience is a good fit for your product.
Please note that a media kit is No a resume Include attractive images, graphics and fonts to make it more vibrant.
5. Accept bits during live broadcasts
Bits is Twitch’s internal donation system. They allow viewers to donate to their favorite streamers while they are live.
Bit messages are highlighted in chat and can even appear as Twitch alerts. They encourage viewers to get involved for this reason.
Streamers get $0.01 per bit.
Viewers can purchase bits in packages ranging from 100 bits for $1.40 to 25,000 bits for $308.
6. Accept donations during broadcasts
You can also set up donations through a third-party app like Streamlabs or PayPal.me.
Once you’ve set up your donation link, you can add a Donate button to the About section of your Twitch page.
When you use an app like Streamlabs, you can set up Twitch Alerts that trigger an animation on your screen whenever someone donates to your stream.
Streamlabs in particular allows you to receive donations via credit card. This reduces the amount of fees you have to pay per donation, as Twitch’s built-in donation system and PayPal itself receive a much larger reduction.
However, like the bits, on-screen alerts encourage viewers to take the plunge and donate.
Your name is displayed and they play the sound of your own personalized message read by a computer generated voice.
7. Sell the goods
One strategy to learn when it comes to making money on Twitch is to sell branded merchandise like t-shirts, hoodies, hats, mugs, and more.
It’s another strategy that anyone can use, regardless of how many followers they have or how many concurrent views they get.
The easiest way for small creators to sell products is through dropshipping. through a print-on-demand service.
Upload the models and choose which products you want to sell. Only You pay for products when customers place orders.
Each product is priced, and you profit by charging the customer more than your chosen print-on-demand service charges you.
The service handles everything from order fulfillment to returns processing. All you need to do is set up and run an online store to sell everything.
Sellfy, Printful, and Printify are great examples of this type of service. Streamlabs also offers this service for Twitch streamers.
Once everything is set up, you can advertise your merchandise during live streams and leave prompts in the About section, as well as in chat via Twitch bots.
8. Upload clips to third-party video platforms
While you may not be ready to create dedicated content for platforms like YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook, you can at least upload clips from previous Twitch streams to these platforms.
Many streamers upload short clips like TikToks, YouTube clips, and reels to Instagram and Facebook.
Some upload broadcast highlights as YouTube videos. These are compilation videos from previous broadcasts. Others upload past streams in their entirety to YouTube.
Although not unique content, this approach Do it they allow you to increase your followers on other platforms and even earn additional income.
Get started creating videos on Twitch with the platform’s built-in editor. You can also ask your followers and subscribers to create clips.
The easiest platform for uploading videos is YouTube. This is because Twitch allows you to connect your account to accounts on other platforms, including YouTube.
When you’re signed in to Twitch, click your profile icon, then go to Settings → Connections and click the Sign In to YouTube button.
After choosing your YouTube account and allowing the connection, you will be able to export any Twitch clip or VOD to YouTube without having to download it.
Use a tool like StreamLadder to turn your Twitch clips into downloadable videos, which you can then upload to TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.
All you need is the URL of the video clip or file.
After uploading to StreamLadder, you can resize and drag a small window to choose which part of the video you want to convert into a clip optimized for third-party platforms.
You can even choose a split screen option that adds your face cam on top of the game clip.
The conversion itself only takes a few seconds. You can then download the converted clip and upload it to any platform you like.
9. Create or join a broadcast team
A stream team is a close-knit group of streamers who are connected by a common interest.
Some streaming teams are big, like G Fuel, an energy drink company that operates a streaming team made up of the hundreds of popular Twitch streamers they sponsor.
Other teams are much smaller, like a group of two to five streamers who have come together on behalf of the collaboration.
In fact, collaboration is the main benefit of joining a flow team. The members often broadcast together and promote each other’s channels.
If your partners have more followers than you, you’ll be able to get your name in front of a larger audience, which in turn will generate more revenue for you.
Only Twitch partners can create streaming teams. If you want to join one, search the web or see a similar database gnome sully.
Unfortunately, Twitch doesn’t have a «search» forum or streaming team directory.
10. Join an Esports team
Are you good at any of the competitive games you play? Really good?
If so, you can improve your Twitch monetization strategy by joining an esports team and participating in tournaments.
Esports is a competitive game with great indulgence towards the viewer.
Like traditional sports, sports have leagues, organizations, and teams. By joining a team, you can earn a base salary between $50 and $75,000, as well as many prizes when you win tournaments.
The prize money depends on the tournaments, your team and the game you play.
According to Esports Earnings, the most profitable game is dota 2 with over $310 million won in over 1,700 tournaments.
Other profitable games include Fortnite, Counter Strike: Global Offensive, and League of Legends.
Even if you never win a tournament, entering the esports scene under your Twitch channel name can go a long way toward expanding your personal brand.
Final Thoughts on How to Make Money on Twitch
These are all fantastic monetization strategies, but if you’re really curious about how to make money on Twitch, you probably want to learn about the most effective monetization strategies.
Your best bet for success as a Twitch streamer is to get brand endorsements and become a partner so you can start earning subscriptions.
Sure, there are third-party subscription services like Patreon, but most Twitch viewers are used to subscribing to their favorite creators. through Twitch.
Therefore, it is best to keep them on the platform.
You also need to sign up for proper affiliate programs and start selling branded products.
When it comes to growing a following, make sure you have good audio quality and be charismatic while streaming.
Talk to viewers as they type in the chat and keep the conversation going even when the chat is silent.
Above all, try to have fun and show your enthusiasm. Spectators will match your energy with similar enthusiasm.
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