from Hacker News

The Dire, Bullshit Economics of Twitch Creators

by haywirez on 2/16/22, 7:39 PM with 21 comments

  • by aahortwwy on 2/17/22, 2:27 AM

    A somewhat disingenuous article discussing a problem as old as the entertainment industry and painting it as Twitch being somehow uniquely exploitative.

    > I hope I convinced you to mentally categorize the average hard-working streamer’s career hopes accurately — well into the lottery ticket territory.

    98% of channels on Twitch aren't monetized. They don't get revenue share because they don't generate any revenue. The bar for monetization on Twitch is very low. So low that "the average hard-working streamer" should be able to meet it pretty easily. Among monetized channels the percentage making minimum wage is closer to 1.5% - very low, but not what I would call "lottery ticket territory".

    It's also worth noting that at the time of the leak about 50% of active channels on Twitch were about a year old. It takes years to start seeing any sort of "real" money from entertainment, and that's not unique to streaming. The chart in the article showing distribution of earnings seems to show a pretty typical power distribution, which is to be expected in entertainment media.

  • by RF_Savage on 2/17/22, 1:27 AM

    Damn. 0.117% of twitch streamers making even 15kUSD a year is rather bleak in terms of calling it a potential career.

  • by TheRealNGenius on 2/17/22, 6:35 AM

    That's a very visually repulsive website with titles for graphs/charts made for Antman and co.

  • by paulryanrogers on 2/17/22, 1:44 AM

    Describing the shove sellers as LARPing content creation is very incisive. Funny how often the most successful are often selling "how to sell/create" or some fictional image of creation.

  • by erulabs on 2/17/22, 1:39 AM

    The post ends with the term “fishpilled”, which I have never heard before and cannot find a definition for. Anyone have a definition?

  • by vintermann on 2/17/22, 10:53 AM

    > In this model, even a 10x increase in payouts would not broaden the base significantly.

    I wonder if this isn't true of e.g. Spotify as well.