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Comment by Buttons840 | Hacker News Reader

Number of subs is often known, and the relative size of channels is known. Unless someone's going to be surprised that someone with double the viewers makes double the money, I doubt there will be any surprises.

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There are a few outliers in this data. Some streamers with smaller viewer bases are making more because of exclusivity deals, so I imagine there will be a little bit of drama.

Examples? And what makes you think that one-off payments for exclusivity are in that data? Because they're not.

Different contracts between Twitch partners have different levels of ad density, as well as differing amounts of cuts of subs/bits taken by Twitch. It's pretty negligible though, and could have been kinda estimated previously. For example, Hasanabi is claimed to have one of the lowest ad density requirements on twitch (1 60 second ad per 1 hour of broadcast, plus 3 minute ad at end of broadcast) which does line up with him making less than multiple streamers with less subs than him (and with probable higher ad densities required by contract).

Yeah, this has nothing per se to do with exclusivity though. (As in, XX months exclusivity to Twitch. For those who don't know, every common partnered streamer already is exclusively bound to Twitch for livestreaming content. If he wants to stream somewhere else, he loses his partnership. (And yes, there are exceptions, old contracts, ...))

And "premium contracts" to keep talent were offered pretty much since day 1, just looked quite different back then. (Mainly just differentiated in sub share. For the last 2-3 years they also include better ad payouts (and a minimum of ad time), boni for minimum amount of hours streamed, etc.))

And... every streamer who only cares a bit about his business already knows, at least for the most part, what kind of contract other streamers are on.

So don't think there will be any (real) drama - but I also didn't see or hear of any extreme unexpected outliers.

I think a lot of the general public / viewer base is not aware of how much money streamers are really making. And I would guess other streamers have a sense but not total amounts. We will see...

I was under the impression that Twitch streamers were able to be directly tipped by viewers (as opposed to being paid by the view or something by some centralized payment distribution point) and so while there would of course be a correlation on viewers to income, the variance is going to be high... some people are going to be much better at monetizing their user base than others, and I would at least expect the streamer's charm, business model, and audience targeting to swamp a mere 2x difference in viewers.

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