The Truth About Making a Living Off of Youtube and Twitch

There was a video circulating around reddit which showed a young man basically talking about how he was looking to give up streaming on twitch because it was near impossible to make it. He said he had been streaming every day for three years straight and still was nowhere near being able to make a living off the website and had let his life basically fall into shambles in the process. He was saying what we all know deep down is true which is that 99.9% of the people out there will never be able to make a living off Twitch or Youtube.

Becoming a popular streaming or Youtuber is incredibly hard and filled with a lot of work that you will never reap the rewards for off the bat. I have seen channels that are masterfully done yet only have a few thousand subscribers. While usually if you keep this quality of content up in the long run you will gain an audience, it is still very unlikely that audience will be able to support you making videos full time. The adpocolypse on Youtube only made this harder in the last couple years and even people will a million subscribers are finding it hard to create content full time.

Most people who even make any sort of a living on the internet have to gain a bunch of different types of revenue streams to even survive each month. At this point most people who are on Youtube have branched out to platforms like Youtube live or Twitch just so they can make the money they lost during the adpocalypse. This also means that they have an advantage when people who view Twitch steams are looking to watch content. There is a much greater chance they will go to the streams where they can interact with their youtube creators, over small creators.

Youtube might be difficult to get started, but Twitch is brutal in getting any sort of following. It mostly will come down to pure luck because people cant even see your content. When you are streaming a popular game, finding you is like picking a needle out of a haystack. Youtube at least has an algorithm that might push your video every once in a while, but it comes down to luck as well. I always say that getting your first 10,000 subscribers on Youtube is going to be harder than getting from 500k to a million in most cases. Once you get to that point you pretty much grow at a calculated pace.

I see many people who want to be Twitch streamers full time but it should mostly just be a hobby unless you have another form of income coming through. It can be a great supplementary income by doing something you enjoy doing, but alone it can be extremely hard. If that is the path you are interested in going, I would look into some sort of freelance or other job you could do from home in order to pay the bills and stream when you have the downtime. If it is truly your dream, dont give up on it, but realize you will probably need to treat it as a hobby for a long time and maybe forever if you want to earn a real living.

-Calaber24p