Twitch Streamers Are Getting Paid $50,000 An Hour To Play New Games: They Deserve It.
Source:
forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2019/0...eserve-it/
The Wall Street Journal has published a new report that details how top streamers, those who attract 15,000 or more viewers simultaneously, can earn between $25,000 and $50,000 an hour when publishers pay them to stream a newly released game.
It's not a new practice, but its frequency has been increased as of late, and was seen in the high profile case of Apex Legends recently, where rumor has it EA paid Ninja $1 million to stream Apex Legends for a few days. If that was $50,000 an hour, and Ninja played Apex on sponsored streams for 20 hours across a few days, that math does indeed check out.
When I say these streamers deserve it, I'm not saying the physical act of playing a new game for a few days is labor worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. But I am saying that this is an extremely effective way to market a new game compared to traditional advertising. You have these streamers who have captive audiences of anywhere from 5,000 to 200,000 viewers at a time, depending on what they're playing, and it's a direct showcase of your product not in a thirty second, questionably targeted TV ad or pop-up banner, but it's hours of gameplay at a time streamed directly to your target audience through the mechanism of a public figure they like and trust. There's really nothing else like it across other forms of advertising. It's like paying Lebron James to speak into a camera for two days straight about new pair of shoes on a stream watched by thousands or millions of captive fans. It's a level of direct targeting and mass exposure to a product that is invaluable, so invaluable that $25-$50,000 an hour, depending on the streamer, is almost a steal, especially when you consider the tens of millions of dollars that are already spent on far more traditional and far less effective forms of advertising in the industry.
I gotta say this is a lot of money they are getting paid. And some streamers are lucky to have a lot of people following them so they can stream and make money on that. I think though to quit your job and do this as a carrer you would be really lucky.
