Twitch counts it as a subscription if you use the free "subscription" from Amazon Prime. The thing is that it has to be manually applied every month. So if he's off for a couple days, very few people will resubscribe if they're not on his channel -- because he's off. It's not like 40k cancelled a subscription at once, their gift ran out and most re-upped as soon as he was back on a couple days later.