Twitch Revenue Breakdown: How much can you earn from Twitch?

In 2020, livestreaming and online broadcasting grew as the pandemic pushed people to stay at home with social distancing guidelines. Livestreaming flourished, seeing an almost 100% year-over-year growth from April 2019 to April 2020. Twitch noted 819 million (819,000,000) hours viewed across all categories in April 2019. In April 2020, that number exploded to 1.654 billion — it more than doubled! Data has also shown that, though the growth has slowed, the momentum continued into 2021 with 2.1 billion hours of content viewed in April 2021. It’s no surprise with growth like that, more and more people have found themselves interested in becoming broadcasters on the site. But there it’s not as simple as it might seem to set up a channel and start raking in the income from all those viewers!

Twitch describes the revenue you’re eligible to receive on their site as an affiliate or partner as “Program Fees.” These fees are bits and cheering, channel subscriptions, qualifying purchases, special programs, and advertisements. The three you’re going to be the most interested in as a smaller creator on the site are bits and cheering, channel subscriptions, and advertisements.

With bits and cheering, you (the broadcaster) earns one U.S. cent ($0.01) per Bit sent in your Twitch channel’s chat. A Bit is technically digital content (i.e., the animated emoticons that appear in your chat when bits are sent), but most people consider it by its monetary value (1 bit = 1 cent, 100 bits = 1 dollar, 1000 bits = 10 dollars, etc.). When you are given bits by viewers, you’ll receive 100% of the revenue from these bits, unlike the profits you share with Twitch through subscriptions which we’ll talk about next. Viewers can buy bits in packages ranging from 100 for $1.40 USD to 25,000 for $308.00 USD.

So if a viewer buys a package of 25,000 bits for $308, they have a paying power of $250 USD (as 25,000 bits converts to $250 USD) for the $308 USD they spent. With most bit packs, Twitch takes a cut of 20 to 30% of the profit share from the viewer’s purchase.

While viewers can submit bits to your channel via the chat, they can also utilize their bits to make digital purchases through extensions on your channel. Extensions are interactive overlays on your stream and panels in your About tab (viewable below your stream on desktop). Some extensions add features that allow you to display leaderboards, display your schedule, create polls, show information about your stream or the games you’re playing, or even monetize your stream in more ways. Some of the most popular extensions that allow you to earn bits from them are Sound Alerts and Crowd Control. There are many more extensions, but we’ll focus on these two to demonstrate how you can earn revenue through extensions.

With Sound Alerts, you can set specific sounds to be playable on your stream (via a browser source) and price their use with channel point or bits values. Viewers can select from the list of sounds you’ve selected and play sounds by spending the specified amount of channel points or bits. Many utilize this extension for revenue by setting popular sounds at values of 5 to 1000 bits.

Crowd Control allows viewers to take control of the game that you are playing and streaming. Generally, games require independent modding to make this extension work, but the set-up is simple and guided. Viewers can exchange channel points or bits, just like in the Sound Alerts extension, to activate in-game items and effects. You can also adjust the values and availability of different items and effects within the extension to customize the experience for your viewers.

With channel subscriptions, we’re going to focus on Tier 1 subscriptions only as these are the most commonly purchased and gifted on the site. Subscriptions can earn a viewer extra perks in the streamer’s channel (i.e., personalized emotes that can be used sitewide, no advertisements on that channel and stream, sub-only VODs, chat badges, and other benefits denoted by the streamer). Subscriptions at Tier 1 are $4.99 USD. Streamers share the Net Subscription Revenue from channel subscriptions with Twitch at 50% each. The Net Subscription Revenue means total revenue actually received by Twitch from channel subscriptions after additional processing fees, tax amounts, discounts, etc. Basically, this means that creators will not always receive $2.49 USD for a $4.99 USD channel subscription — it may at times be more, but typically it will be less. Viewers can also purchase channel subscriptions to gift to other users and the Net Subscription Revenue share applies to all of these gifted subscriptions, too.

Twitch reserves the right to sell and display advertisements on and throughout your content, whether this be pre-roll ads, in-stream ads, banner ads, or any other type of advertisement that may be present on your channel. Twitch pays advertisement revenue out at certain rates depending on a bunch of different things. The biggest variable is the locality where the viewers of your advertisements are based. It’s not important to know the exact breakdown of advertising revenue share. Advertisement money is paid out either at a rate based on a fixed CPM (cost per thousand impressions) or a percentage of applicable Net Advertisement Revenues. You can see the breakdown for your own channel in your creator dashboard. Scroll all the way down to ‘Revenue share for Advertisements.’ At the time of this blog, many smaller creators report a revenue share of $2.50 to $3.50 USD CPM (or $2.50 to $3.50 in ad revenue for every thousand views on advertisements). Twitch may at times offer incentives like multipliers that increase your CPM or percentage rates. Twitch pays out no more than 75% of the applicable Net Advertisement Revenues from your channel. Most small broadcasters won’t need to think too hard about their advertisement revenue as the gains are so small per view. In my time as a streamer on the site (160 hours streamed; 4,407 live views; 8.1 average viewers), I’ve earned an estimated $3.90 USD from advertising revenue. These numbers will be higher if you stream more often, run more advertisements, have fewer subscribers as viewers, have higher viewership, etc.

The three revenue opportunities above are the most common for streamers across the site. If you’re a broadcaster on Twitch, these are three places you’ll see the majority of your income coming from.

For more information and legal jargon, see the Twitch.tv Affiliate Agreement.

For more information on monetizing your Twitch content, see Twitch’s guides.