Something we used to scoff at in places like Asia, now even casual relationships are utterly commoditized and we taught a whole generation of young humans how that's the most normal thing in the world.
I feel like it's substantially different, you are paying Disney the money to watch the movie, you don't really care about the actors or other people who worked on it.
On the other hand, twitch users pay for the sake of paying money, it's closer to something like strip clubs.
What about comedy clubs? If I buy a ticket to see Dave Chappelle, who is clearly wealthy, am I sucker too?
What about paying cover at my local bar because a local band is playing that night?
What about buying tickets to a baseball game, to see a bunch of millionaires play a game for a few hours?
You are making it seem like users get nothing for their money, when there is plenty of established precedent for giving money in exchange for attending a performance.
Sure the performance has changed, but the actual difference here is that these Twitch millionaires (and the rest who are far from millionaires) are literally charging "pay what you can" instead of setting a minimum ticket price for their show. Plenty of people (the majority in fact) get the show for free.
Groceries are necessary for survival, and limited in quantity.
Movies and streams are similar to each other because they are both video content. And as long as the creator of the stream or the company behind a movie get paid enough to make the content they could’ve received no more money and still gotten by fine.
Streams are a little bit different from movies though because much of the audience is actively engaging in conversation with the creator or making requests to them etc. In that sense a stream has an aspect of limited supply to it that a movie does not. At some point the audience of a stream will be too big for the creator to be able to meaningfully interact with all of them, and at a point after that maybe even too big to be able to meaningfully interact with any of them.
And so if you have a lot of people that want to interact with you it makes sense to prefer interacting with the ones paying you money, and to encourage them to do so. And beyond that, it also makes sense to offer “exclusive” content to people that pay. So OnlyFans makes sense too.
What really has me upset though is thinking of the people that are on the audience, among whom some people have little money but also get so little attention IRL that they are paying someone who already has a lot just to interact with them and maybe even being deluded into thinking that they have some form of “real” relationship with them. That is very sad and something I don’t think has been studied enough and is not being talked about enough.
There was a stint during the GTA V RP craze I had it on in the background and watched it for approximately 6-8 hours every day. I subbed to one streamer for like 5 bucks.
This averages out to like 2 cents/day for 240 hours of entertainment. Cheaper than netflix, cheaper than cable, cheaper than hulu... You catch my drift. I don't know how this is different than me paying $80 to spend a night out at the movies with my wife, other than it being insanely cheaper?
I still think this is a narrow view.
So you don't consider a performance to be a product?
How is going to the movies different from going to a baseball game or a concert or a comedy club?
If those are like movies, and movies are like groceries, are we not back to the same point that people are exchanging money for some kind of benefit, whether it's a tangible thing they take home or an experience they enjoy?
A less emotionally evocative example might be giving money to a street musician who accepts requests for donations. Either way, the street musician is there performing and you can enjoy the music whether you pay or not. But the money gets you a bonus, and you’re free to give money regardless of desire to request a song.
Or at least, maybe that's a welcome side effect but not the main motivation for a lot of people.
I am guessing here, I have no data to back this up, but I feel like a lot of people sub out of gratitude and as a show of support, and less to draw attention or get some kind of shout-out..
I do watch a decent amount of streams on Twitch across a few categories, but I've never subscribed or donated to any of them, so it's possible I'm wrong here.
Also I did make the distinction between paid performances and "pay what you can".. That was indeed my point, that Twitch differentiates itself by being an essentially "pay what you can" service where the majority don't pay anything, but lots of people still manage to make money giving their work away for free.
There are three things you need to survive: food, shelter, and love/community.
Entertainment can sometimes provide the last one (love/community) but for the most part it's fulfilling a need for distraction and/or curiosity.
I treat museums the same way. When I was young and poor my parents didn't pay to get in since it was optional. But now that I'm older and I make good money, I donate extremely well when I go to museums. I know that it's voluntary and I choose to participate in funding it because I enjoy the experience.
If nobody paid to go to the movies, then nobody would want to advertise in those movies, those movies would lose their sponsorships, and stop being made. If everybody unsubbed from netflix right now they would stop funding original content, even though the content they make has ad placements. Why even ask netflix for money if you can just make a wildly successful tv show with ad placements and release it for free?
Why should you pay to go to a football game? Why should you pay to watch a football game? All the players have sponsors. They're all millionaires. Why did our parents pay for cable? Cable had ads, all the actors were millionaires, the cable company owners were millionaires, the production studios were millionaires. You're saying practically everyone who bought cable in the 1990s-2000s was bad with their money because the actors were millionaires and had ad sponsrships? Give me a break.
I just think it's incredibly disingenuous that because someone is leveraging a SLIGHTLY different monetization model that allows for free consumption, that anyone who pays for it is bad with their money. Maybe if you condemned ALL luxury spending with the same energy I could see you're at least being consistent. But this is just more irrational disdain for the new wave of media consumption.
Some people, on the other hand, like to reward others if they enjoy the product/service/performance they provide.
That's the nature of "pay what you can". If money is tight, then don't pay, and don't feel bad about it. But if you have disposable income, and you value the experience, then give what you can as a form of gratitude.
It doesn't need to be said that if everyone took the "it's free so I don't have to pay anything" route, then there would be no show to see.
If you would pay money for Dave to shout "Hey sbarre, thanks for the donation" from the stage, then you'd be doing what Twitch fans are doing.
My favorite twitch streamer, 'x5_pig' (996th highest earner on twitch) only grossed $186,000 over 24 months, and lives in a fairly HCOL area in Australia. I'm happy to give him $5 or so to help make sure that he continues to stream an EOL game, Starcraft2.
Sure, he has other revenue streams as well but I can only imagine the risk he takes by sticking with a game that's been EOL'd. When Blizzard shuts down the servers I imagine he'll have no career left at all and will likely have to start over in a totally different career. I'd be surprised if he could start streaming some other strategy game and maintain enough earnings.
I pay him $5/month to help swing his risk-reward balance in favor of continuing to produce the content that I most enjoy vegetating to after my 12 hour day of coding/troubleshooting/collaborating.
Sure, he has other revenue streams (YouTube, announcing for major tournaments, etc). But I imagine for him it may be important to earn enough over the 10 year life of Starcraft2 to mostly-retire in case he ends up without a "real" career.
In fact, sometimes I wonder whether income tax brackets could potentially include consideration for short-lived high earning careers. Seems it might be slightly broken to tax someone who has a stable $1MM/year income for 30+ years (e.g. car dealership owner) the same % as someone who makes $1MM this year, but next year might be earning $40,000 working at that car dealership (athletes, streamers, windfalls, etc). Seems like it might make sense to allow people to "defer" earnings to future years, as long as income tax is eventually paid in full. This could allow people who unexpectedly earn $1MM for just one year to spread out those earnings over 10 years and pay a more appropriate % as taxes. Not sure what else this could break though, or how much of a problem it really solves vs. other things legislators could be spending time on.
https://www.ato.gov.au/business/primary-producers/in-detail/...
On youtube you have streamers merging under the same umbrella to create branded channels.
IMO the differences compared to Disney is the scale of the production and the interactive medium (which is constrained by scale). Once you reach a certain scale I don't think you can expect much direct interaction due to the volume of chat. So really it's just scale.
Plenty of people do, of course. Celebrity worship is quite common.
At least when i donate to blue origin i get something tangible delivered to my door.
Where is the value exchange in being one of 10k people building a faux-relationship with a hot tub streamer?
Of all the things on Twitch the value of Hot Tub streams seem very upfront and I think it's pretty telling that there are vanishingly few successful streamers doing it and that for all the hot air people spew about its a very niche part of the site.
ohwee! the streamer might read out your username along with a scripted line after a 5 dollar subscription!1Eleven
And by its very nature, it is ephemeral.
Undelivered promises and lawsuits against NASA to slow down space exploration for all of us ?
Subscribing or donations are completely optional. ( subscriptions get rid of the adds, but I doubt that's a main driver)
Without the payment the service wouldn't be accessible
Telling blue collar workers you work in tech usually gets a nearly identical reaction to what you just gave. etc etc.
The blue collar workers are right too. They should be getting paid a lot more. Certainly not less than streamers. It's not fair and I refuse to accept it.
Come to think of it, advertisers seem to be a major cause of these distortions. They distort the value of activities that happen to have an audience. Yet another reason to block ads: help restore balance to society by ensuring people are properly rewarded for the actual value of their work instead of how many eyeballs they can summon.
In streaming case, for whatever reason you want to make a donation to somebody, not doing it because they are richer than you seems very strange to me.
Looks like someone dumped everything on their github enterprise.
I wonder if this'll lead to software engineers in big companies having more restricted access to code?
I don't think that Twitch has closed source code because they want to keep code private. It's probably more a matter of don't want to show commit message in case there are some bad words inside it. And don't want to show the world in case their source code look bad.
Twitch without its code source can't work yeah, but imagine if all the commits of Twitch were public I doubt it would change anything for them.
That would be nice if their was a mental change about source code and that it is fine to show it even if it looks shit.
There is also the issue of security. I'm sure people will be combing through the source code to find anything they can exploit, even if it's a simple XSS attack. It could either be sold/used for malicious actions or submitted to the bug bounty program for the reward money.
Snippets of open source code.
Commit messages that imply anti-competitive behaviour ("Committing a change to the API to lockout competitor XYZ").
Commit messages that imply code theft ("Using a method that we used at my previous company").
etc.
Sometimes things that look sketchy might be innocent but will still cause nightmares for twitch since they'll now have to play defensively as people call into question anything that ever went into the repo.
Before per-branch controls, the only way to disable write access (while maintaining read access, pull-request privs, etc) to a repository's blessed branches was forks.
The number of git repos might look big but without knowing more, the content of most of those repos could be a complete nothingburger. Number of git repos is pretty meaningless metric, IMO.
Back in the mid 90's there was a issue in Scotland when a well known journalist got a job in a call center and looked up the private telephone numbers for the Queen.
Actually the more I think about it - that does seem like a lot if you add in their other rev from youtube channels and other compensation. I understand why all the pro players started working on their twitch stream content more than winning competitions. More stable business and viewer base.
Ninja was famously paid $1MM for an 8 hour ad of playing Apex at launch.
I've had private conversation with large streaming friends that have all said independently that the amount they get paid from a short Raid Shadow Legends ad is huge. One said it's enough to buy a nice car, and if they hit their target downloads (w/ link) the number jumps up to enough to buy multiple nice cars.
There is a lot of big money for streamers, not just big streamers.
I'm not surprised by any of this. If you ever did any digging in to how much advertising pays, ran numbers on twitch subs, etc, these numbers match that quite closely.
It's even more interesting that for 50k gross, you have to beat this guy "DEMOLITION_D" at the #4432 place.
Also: 4.8M/24 people is still 200k per head. Even if you assume that various costs take 50% of the revenue, they're all still making 6 figures for a thing that's pretty much a side hustle for most of them.
Also it started out being a side gig but most of them have switched to it as their primary gig. They are starting campaign 3 this fall.
As a point of comparison, a talented voice actor can gross around $125k per year, working from home as a freelancer. I don't feel that the Critical Roll actors are being overcompensated at all.
The most amazing Critical Role fact might be its creation was indirectly financed by Youtube/Google :o. Felicia Day knew all of those guys and about their private DnD game, she invited them to film few episodes for her YT channel "Geek & Sundry". Channel started with $1Mil advance from YouTube Original Channel Initiative, one of the rare if brief successes.
It's basically a regular job at that point.
If you look at social class stratification, the general assumption is that if you have to work a job for your income, you're not upper class, you're serving in the employment of the upper class. If you have a high paying job, that's defined as "upper middle" social class at least until you have accumulated wealth to transition to a capitalist/owner/investor role (as some popular musicians and athletes do); being in the top 4% of earners is quite reasonable for traditional upper middle class roles e.g. independent lawyers and doctors, which also tend to earn 200k+/year in USA.
The media/VC etc community has been hyping e-gaming as the new sports domain. That said the top salary for a sports player is $168M / year for one player (Lionel Messi) and number 99 is $35M/year (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_sports_contrac...)
It really shows how much of a step change there is between the sports & e-sports and I would be curious how much of this Twitch is keeping to themselves instead of paying out.
Not to mention how much uptime e-gamers have to put in.
Paying all that talent adds up.
This is not worth worrying about. If Twitch is making you reset your password, that means you don’t need to hurry because they’ve already locked your account. If your password hash leaked, the important thing isn’t Twitch, it’s every other place you used the same password.
I remember some services send you a message telling you to change your password anytime a new device logs in or even fails to login to your account. That causes most people to pick weaker passwords, since they're not all using manager apps.
Why? Any breach that involves usernames/passwords are account name and password combos that get tried on EVERY POSSIBLE SITE after.
It only takes one pair of username with a reused password for this to work.
Use a password manager, and reset your password if the service has been compromised.
Expecting people to simply memorize a unique, strong password for every single website that they use is unrealistic. Of course, no solution is perfect, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't improve the current situation of people reusing passwords with maybe slight modifications per website.
7BB7DB877943832837046863EF45C252D3A08C92A273F7B665210A6E12701095
Do you have Amouranth's or xQcOW's salted hash from this leak? Might be worth trying to brute force it.
You try on those kinds of accounts because they might have re-used it or the password might be patterned or not completely random, which gives you a chance that the credential might give you access elsewhere.
edit: I saw it mentioned in that /g/ thread that these numbers are without the donations.
If you arbitrarily take $50k as a living wage then it's basically the top 2000 streamers who can make a living on Twitch. Random googling tells me there were approximately 8 million active streamers in September. Again arbitrarily assuming that 7 million of those are 'casual' and doing it for fun that means the percentage of streamers making a living wage is 0.002%.
Back of the napkin math but kinda depressing.
Edit: Someone on Twitter told me that Affiliate status is pegged around the top 3% of streamers. So taking that as my new baseline for "trying to make it" since you can actually get paid out, it raises the percentage to a whopping 0.008%!
Plus, Twitch is probably just one source of income for many content creators. For many it's not their primary source, but just a side source. YouTube, Patreon, OnlyFans, outside sponsors, or even esports may be where they make most of their money.
I have spent decades of my life learning about how to use, propagate, and cultivate most plants, animals, fungi, and minerals (not the propagate part here) in an area +/- 100 miles from where I live. I've taught a couple of State University extension classes, and regularly sell at a farmers market the things I gather/grow, just for shits and giggles.
People have asked me for years why I don't do this for a living. Why don't I do that instead of working a job that I am neutral to, but that pays the bills.
Because all of that sounds exhausting. Needing to maintain a presence on so many platforms, interact with so many people, and constantly be thinking about my next thing for all of the various platforms is just exhausting.
I don't know how people can do it without burning out.
The thing is the power law curve is so strong that if we take the top ten thousand which sets a living wage at approximately $11.5k which is definitely not a living wage in a lot of places people stream from then that only improves things to the top 0.04% (of those trying to make it).
> Plus, Twitch is probably just one source of income for many content creators. For many it's not their primary source, but just a side source. YouTube, Patreon, OnlyFans, outside sponsors, or even esports may be where they make most of their money.
If you read the original comment the gross amount supposedly includes 3rd party revenue.
On top of that, besides their eceleb status, most of these people aren't that professional. Plenty of them are a combination of variety or casual, often to a degree the person isn't even that good in games in general.
Their production quality also isn't anywhere near amazing (note it can be both organic and high quality), and other parties (e.g. Hololive) have shown how easily the space can be disrupted. For those curious, notice how many top streamers still lack actual high quality audio (mostly from their own lack of voice training rather than equipment), proper schedules and sticking to those schedules, high quality video when applicable (e.g. bad light), allow themselves to get devolved in politics, allow their streams to go majorly off-track in general, etc. It's not like these guys don't have the means to drastically improve it.
And the obvious: we don't have anywhere as much of a shortage of people willing to play games in an extremely dedicated manner as doing software development.
On production quality, I think it's a mistake to think it matters too much. Live streaming is a different thing to television. In very much the same way Roblox is different to AAA games.
There's also a level outside of the more chaotic personalities who make a lot of money in spite of themselves where there is a lot of professionalism going in to making things seem pretty casual because these people know their audience.
The other problem with looking at hours worked is it's hard to quantify sporadic interactions on multimedia and the likes. Arguably the biggest drain, most of these people are always "online" and have a hard time unplugging themselves. This is further exasperated by the momentum loss most streamers perceive when not streaming for a long while.
>On production quality, I think it's a mistake to think it matters too much
But we don't really know that yet. It's extremely hard to quantify all these variables and what truly matters. What we do know is many people in these circles have fallen to the side since they were unable to keep up with the modicum of effort newcomers put in despite their lack of resources and despite the first-mover advantage these old-timers had. At the same time, we see other parties break through with new concepts while putting in a ton of effort to market and PR themselves, and it worked, as seen with the Hololive example. The top earner is (apparently) also much more professional than the majority of the top 10/100/N.
>Live streaming is a different thing to television
If anything, this is the biggest problem. If beginners are expected/advised to put in much more effort and resources to (increase their odds of) breaking through compared to before, why is it acceptable for someone earning a Silicon Valley-equivalent salary while living in a much lower CoL area to stream in a dank basement or attic with poor audio quality? This isn't a criticism as much as a question. Maybe it doesn't matter. But it's also the question which makes people wonder "should they be earning as much as they do?"
It’s an entertainment corporation that just happens to run on Twitch.
No Twitch donations, Patreon, merch sales etc.
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:N5BLZ6XECNEHHARHJOVQAS4W7TWRXCSI&dn=twitch-leaks-part-one&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fopen.stealth.si%3A80%2Fannounce
rumor was recently negotiations have been very cut and dry for newer big/up and coming streamers basically being told to take some algorithmically assigned cut or give up partner status.
Top 10k Streamers by Revenue: https://pastebin.com/LjmaPNam
Contains the following data points:
'ad_share_gross', 'sub_share_gross', 'bits_share_gross', 'bits_developer_share_gross', 'bits_extension_share_gross', 'prime_sub_share_gross', 'bit_share_ad_gross', 'fuel_rev_gross', 'bb_rev_gross'
(TTS donations, 3rd party revenue like OnlyFans, Patreon, Amazon Gifts and sponsorship deals... are not included)
Total gross payout in the leak (2019/8 to 2021/10) was 4.2 billion dollars across 344k users. (based on data points above alone but could be wrong since it's annons on 4chan.)
PS: Make sure to change your Twitch (and possibly Prime) password. Twitch is already prompting users to do so based on Reddit posts.