How to Make Money on Twitch 101 - The Basics

If you're looking to make a career as a full-time streamer, then you're in the right place. This guide aims to help teach you how to make money on Twitch, ensuring that you will have at least a headstart compared to those who are going in blind.

But before we go on, note that this guide only features the simplest-to-understand mechanics of making money on Twitch. This means we're not going into the nitty-gritty details of things like game sales, virtual cheers/bits, and others that have deeper, far more complicated inner workings. This is to ensure that the article is as concise as possible. So now that that's out of the way, let's begin!

Donations

Perhaps the most straightforward way for a Twitch streamer to make money is by getting a donation from viewers. Anyone who likes your content can just wire the money straight into your pickets. But that doesn't mean it's simple, because you still need to build a large enough audience to do that. Nobody will donate to you if nobody's watching your content, obviously.

Donations on Twitch are mostly made via adding a "Donate" button to your channel, as per NerdWallet. This button then leads to PayPal, Venmo, or any other related app.

Ad Revenue

Just like YouTubers, Twitch streamers can also make money via ad revenue. Oberlo says Twitch ads are often worth between $0.002 and #0.01 per view. But this depends on how many viewers are watching your stream simultaneously, where those viewers are located, and the kind of content you're streaming.

This is basically the easiest way to make money on Twitch - albeit one that only earns you enough if your audience is big. So before you start making life-changing money just from ads, you need to build your audience first.

Subscriptions

Gaining a large enough audience would get you invited into the Twitch Affiliate program (which is worth an entire article on its own, so we'll leave that for now). Once you become an Affiliate, you can now offer your own subscription service so your most avid viewers can subscribe and never miss your new content, writes Shopify.

All in all, there are three different subscription levels you can offer your viewers. There's a $4.99 tier, a $9.99 tier, and a $24.99 tier per month. Every single tier has different perks that will allow your viewers to show their love for you and your content as you stream. Then again, this only applies to you if you gain enough viewership to become a Twitch Affiliate.

Sponsorships

Sponsorships can be had if you gain enough following and prove that you're really good at what you're streaming. It doesn't matter whether you're streaming a popular game or if you're streaming some other type of content. If you're good at what you do, brands and companies will find you and offer you to promote their products live on air.

Sponsorships can also vary depending on the offer you get. Relatively smaller channels can be paid just to mention the company's name or show its logo on stream. Bigger channels can actually get free stuff from the brand itself. But when you do get paid to promote a company or product, you still need to alert your viewers that you're doing a paid sponsorship, as per the Twitch Terms of Service.

Conclusion

As you can see, learning how to make money on Twitch starts with one thing: gaining enough followers. You can't expect to earn money as a Twitch streamer without building a big enough audience, can you? So go ahead: work on your content, make things more engaging, and you might just be able to make a career out of this.