Towelliee makes around 7-8k/month according to an AMA he did a few month ago and it has quite a bit of insight there.

He's shown that you don't have to be top gamer skill wise to make a lot of money. He's decent at games, but he isn't any sort of 'Pro' at any sort of game he plays:

http://www.reddit.com/comments/tufo9/i_am_a_twitchtv_partner...

http://www.twitch.tv/towelliee

Destiny, who is a very controversial streamer, (and probably doesn't make this much anymore) said he made about 3.5k/month from streaming 1.5k for lessons. He was a pretty heavy streamer with lots of viewers. This was 2 years ago though so the numbers may have changed.

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/g7q91/iam_destiny_i_qu...

He makes a lot more now, especially since he went to LoL and gets even more viewers. You can get somewhat of an idea as to how the system works from this post: http://www.destiny.gg/n/own3d-tv-a-beginners-guide-to-being-...

His contract with Twitch is NOT the same, of course, but it's similar, especially on value. These streamers also make money from donations, so keep that in mind. I've heard that some donations were as high as 10k, which is insane. Not all streamers get that much. I've also heard that one popular streamer showed his Paypal account on stream and had upwards of 90k. Speculation, I know, but I don't think it's far fetched. You can also go on certain streams and read off the donations that they post, add it up, and extrapolate to a month's salary. Just from donations!

The LoL streamers earn A LOT of money from streaming. A team may get 30K viewers PER MEMBER. TSM did this for a while. Their members would barely focus on team practice, they'd stream most of the day to upwards of 20k+ viewers. TSM also does an online invitational tournament which also gets a ton of viewers.

Simply put, the market is growing and a lot of that growth is coming from Twitch. They have a ton of power now and it's scary. Sure, if Twitch went away, e-Sports would still be around because that part of the industry is built around tournament and sponsorship money. What would happen, though, is a lot of people would lose their jobs and e-Sports would be destabilized for quite a while. Not that Twitch will go away suddenly, but they have way too much power and I would not be surprised if they started abusing it even more.

Twitch has an agenda now. Talk to any Admin and you'll know this. Their agenda is to appear professional. Thus, anything deemed unprofessional is going to get you in trouble. This means, essentially, that any non-gaming content is barred completely. Streamers will usually take breaks from their games (they play for 6+ hours in one sitting) by watching stuff on stream or just talking and relaxing with the viewers. This is NOT allowed, technically. Some streamers get away with it but I've seen others get reprimanded in the chat for not showing gaming content. It's only going to get worse.

At about that same time, members of Counter Logic Gaming were claiming to make 5-6k a month each streaming, and that they actually lost money going to tournaments and winning them, if they had just put in a normal amount of time streaming over those weekends.

Although winning tournaments might make their stream more popular?

In the short term, no- however, it does keep them relevant as time goes on. most of the reason they said they did it, was because they just couldn't be that interested in the game if not playing at that level.

Hard to know without (1) longitudinal data and (2) surveying samples of their viewers. Your idea is highly plausible, IMO, but only that.