Case Study: imaqtpie

Twitch is a business; and streamers are businessmen and women.

This means that streamers are working for a profit. To do this, streamers rely on certain strategies to entertain their viewers, including focusing heavily on gameplay, being entertaining, or on…other aspects of their “personality.”

Regardless of their strategy, some streamers have found a way to run a very successful business. In addition to my previous work with viewer distribution on Twitch, I set out to paint a picture of the economics of streaming.

To do this, I committed to watching popular streamer imaqtpie between 8AM and 9AM PST every day from March 16 and March 21. During this hour, I kept a written record of the number of subscriptions, number of donations, and the dollar amount of donations he received within that hour. Note that the conclusions I draw here are purely conjecture based on convenient and highly contentious data.

During the 6 hours I viewed imaqtpie’s stream during the week of March 16, he received a grand total of $1105.24 in donations. The above graph shows how those donations were distributed. On March 18, imaqtpie happened to receive an unprecedented $1000.00 donation. This donation may have been refunded by imaqtpie, although there’s no way to know. Even so, it is a clear outlier in the data, so I discount it in the later calculations.

Donations only represent a fraction of the streamer’s income. Streamers also rely on subscribers, viewers who pay about $5.00 a month to support streams they love. Streamers entice subscribers with perks like unique emoticons for chat, and subscriber-only mode in chat. Some have even more interactive perks, like Trick2g’s Subwars, matches where subs from similar ranks play live on stream, and be spectated by the trkGod himself.

Imaqtpie does not hold Subwars, but still makes a good deal more on subscribers than he did from donations (excluding the outlier). It’s clear that enticing subscribers is far more lucrative and consistent than donations.

As a final step in this case study, I made some averages and generalizations (admittedly, very hasty ones) based on the data I collected.

If we assume the patterns I witnessed to be constant, imaqtpie receives, on average, 16.33 subscribers an hour. If he streams for 6 hours a day, which would be a conservative estimate (some streamers pull off 24-hour all-nighters), then imaqtpie makes $490.00 off of subscribers.

The median dollar amount of the donatons, many of which are $4.20, suggests that imaqtpie has a hold on a particular viewer demographic. On average, not counting the $1000.00 donation, imaqtpie recieves $4.78 per donation. At 3.83 donations per hour, for a 6 hour day, imaqtpie will make $110.02 off of donations.

These figures combine for a yearly salary of $144,005.67, if imaqtpie streams for 6 hours a day, 5 days a week (also a conservatively low number). This does not include ad revenue, or any sponsorship deals the streamer has.

The average lawyer makes $131,990.

But, of course, imaqtpie is not an “average” streamer. In fact, he is one of the more popular LoL players, having been a pro until about a year ago.

Streamers are likely to make far less on streaming, and will have to work hard to build up a fanbase if they want imaqtpie’s hefty salary.