How Much Do Streamers Make on Twitch? (Most Make Nothing)

How much do streamers make on Twitch? Here's the honest answer: the big names make fortunes, and most streamers make close to nothing. The middle barely exists.

I streamed for years, made about $3,000 total from it, and now get paid to do content strategy for a living. So let me give you the real math, and then the part nobody ranking for this search will tell you.

The actual payout math

Subs are the core of Twitch money. A Tier 1 sub costs $4.99, and on the standard split the streamer keeps 50%, so about $2.50 per sub per month. Tier 2 ($9.99) and Tier 3 ($24.99) pay proportionally more, but almost all subs are Tier 1.

There's a better split if you get big enough. Per Twitch's Plus Program page, you move to 60/40 if you hold 100 paid recurring subs (Plus Points) for three straight months, and 70/30 at 300. One catch a lot of streamers miss: a gift sub train or Prime subs won't get you there. The qualification math only counts subscribers paying month after month out of their own pocket.

Bits work out to about a penny each to you. Ads pay small streamers almost nothing, a few dollars a month at low viewership. And per Twitch's payout policies, you don't get paid at all until you've earned at least $50.

What streamers actually earn

Here's the distribution, and it's a cliff.

StreamScheme polled their community and found 72.8% of smaller streamers had never earned money from Twitch at all. Not a little. Nothing.

A streamer holding 5 to 10 average viewers typically sees somewhere around $50 to $200 a month, mostly from a handful of loyal subs and the occasional bits. One small streamer publicly shared earning about $65 in a month at 5 average viewers. Run the hourly math on a 20 hour a week schedule and that's under a dollar an hour.

Even at 10 to 49 average viewers, which is already bigger than the vast majority of channels ever get, the median is a few paid subs and low hundreds a month.

The full-time money starts around a few hundred concurrent viewers and up. That's a tiny fraction of everyone streaming.

So here's what I actually want you to hear

The thing a lot of people think is that money is just easy here. It's not. I've already written about why the skills pay better than the fame, so I won't repeat it. Here I'll take it even further:

Stop worrying about money. Make people watch first.

That's the biggest problem the businesses I work with have too. They think they should be making money and getting leads from YouTube, and they have the worst content ever. Same disease, different patient. Nobody earns from an audience they haven't earned.

The question to ask before any of this

How long can you do this for?

Because it's going to take a while to build up, and with streaming you need a schedule or people aren't going to watch at all. So really think about that.

At my highest point I was streaming 4 to 8 hours a day. Missed a day or two here or there, but that was it. I am not telling you to run an insane schedule like that, to me that's just dumb, and promoting your stream matters more than raw hours anyway. But the point stands: you need a schedule you can hold, and you need a way to make money besides all this while you build.

The short version

About $2.50 a sub. Most streamers earn nothing. Small streamers earn double digits a month. The real money starts at audience sizes most people never reach.

Stream because you want to build something, keep a real income while you do, and treat the skills you're stacking as the actual payday. My real numbers from a decade of this are in Why Should You Listen to Me if you want proof I'm not guessing.

I write this blog for creators going from zero to their first 1,000. Subscribe below and every post lands in your inbox.