Our outlets for entertainment and community in 2022 are vastly different to those which once were. In fact, times are continuing to change so quickly that no matter whether you’re 15 or 50, you’ll almost definitely remember a time before streaming got to be this HUGE.
Today, streamers on Twitch and YouTube, as well as esports teams and gamers, can make a decent professional or part-time career as content creators and influencers. Some of them – like Ninja, ibai, Pokimane and Rubius – have even become multi-millionaires through streaming. Tyler Blevins, AKA Ninja, is reportedly worth $40 million US dollars, at the time of writing (2022).
You’re here, cruising the Mindfuture blog for gamers, because you’re wondering if it would be possible for you, too, to turn your hobby – streaming playthroughs of your favourite games – into a full-time job. Of course, in order to work out whether it would be sustainable for you to try, you’ll first need to know how to make money on Twitch, as well as how much money you’d be likely to make.
The team here at Mindfuture are gaming experts whose job it is to connect you, the streamer, with brands who want to advertise to the gaming community. In short, it’s our job to help make you some money doing the thing you love to do best: streaming games.
Unlike other marketing companies, Mindfuture is a gaming agency which truly understands the community. With over 14 years of hard-earned experience supporting sports organizations, brands, streamers and esports teams with sponsorships and brand deals, we know that gamers don’t always like invasive advertising. That’s why our services allow streamers of all kinds to pick and choose which Twitch sponsorship campaigns to get involved in, and which to leave on the table.
It’s time now to dive into our article on how much money Twitch sponsors pay, and how to make money streaming games on Twitch. We’ll walk you through everything you need to know in order to understand Twitch sponsorship inside out, before beginning your own journey toward monetizing your account.
Who can make money on Twitch?
The vast majority of gamers who stream on Twitch do so for fun. You, for example, might even be reading this blog purely out of curiosity, with no intention of turning your hobby into something which pays. It’s important to remember that, if this is the case, that’s okay!
There should be no pressure to monetize your Twitch streaming, since we firmly believe that enjoyment and fulfilment should always remain at the core of what you do. Equally, the professional streaming community isn’t as easy to join as it might appear from the outside.
Following the October 2021 data leak from Twitch, we now know exactly how much many of the top streamers make. Turns out, only the top 10,000 streamers make over $900 per month (or a roughly liveable wage). Given that there are 8 million active Twitch streamers in 2022, that means that just 0.001% of users on Twitch make enough money to go full-time.
Nonetheless, technically anyone can make money on Twitch. Viewers can donate bits to you (1bit = 1¢), or subscribe to your channel. Subscriptions cost a minimum of $4.99, of which Twitch takes a 50% cut. There’s also a $100 minimum threshold you have to reach each month before Twitch pays out. This means you’d have to have a minimum of 40 subscribers in order to earn enough just from subs to make $100 per month.
Here’s the secret, though. Twitch streamers like Ninja and Pokimane don’t make the majority of their cash from bits and subs. They, like every truly successful esports star or gamer, make their money from sponsorship deals. After all, the more people watching your stream, the bigger the potential audience for a brand to advertise to, and the more money you can make (brands pay big to advertise their gamer-specific products to gamer-specific audiences!)
Mindfuture is a gaming agency which believes that everyone – no matter how big or small their following is – should be able to monetize themselves on Twitch. That’s why, unlike other agencies, we invite you to get involved at any stage in your gaming career!
Where to find Twitch sponsors?
There is an art to finding the right Twitch sponsors. Indeed, there is an art to finding any Twitch sponsors at all. For one, gamers are not always the most responsive audience to paid sponsorship and advertising. Like Noah Whinston, CEO of the Immortals esports organisation, puts it:
“With the gamers demographic, people hate being advertised to inauthentically.”
How, then, do you find sponsors who are not only willing to pay you to promote their brand and their products, but also sponsors who are the right fit for you and your audience? Sponsors who understand the gaming community, and respect it at the same time?
There are a few ways you can find sponsors, if you think your Twitch profile is ready to start attracting monetisation:
- Approach companies and brands you already use and like with a well-written sponsorship proposal.
- Engage with brands you know are already sponsoring other Twitch gamers
- Use a dedicated gamer agency like Mindfuture to streamline the whole process
Now, naturally we think the best route for you to take is to join up with us here at Mindfuture. We’ve already got scores of gamer-tailored brands on our roster, ready for you to engage with. From Coca-Cola, Huel, KFC and HyperX, to Sennheiser and Razer, among many others.
But we’re not here exclusively to promote the benefits of working with us. We know gamers, and we appreciate that each Twitch user likes to approach their hobby and profession in unique ways. That’s why we think it’s important to determine which of these three sponsorship routes would work best for you, before embarking along one.
If you opt to check out Mindfuture, then you’ll hopefully find comfort in the ease and simplicity of the sponsorship process.
All you have to do to find Twitch sponsors through Mindfuture is to sign up with us, register your Twitch account, and you’re ready to go!
You’ll have access to a range of different brand campaigns tailored to gamers (which you’ll be eligible for relative to your account’s size and popularity). Simply choose one of these campaigns to get involved with and start making money straight away.
You’ll earn revenue each time one of your viewers sees your ad or clicks on your custom affiliate link.
Types of sponsorship opportunities available to Twitch gamers
Not every sponsorship opportunity is the same, and Twitch sponsorships are very different to sponsorships elsewhere in the eGames industry. Typically, however, there are four different types of way a sponsor might ask you to promote their brand:
- GamePlay
- Affiliate links
- Hosting ads or discussing products & services
- Wearing or displaying branded materials
GamePlay
One of the most obvious products which is likely to be advertised to gamers is, you guessed it, games! It’s what we love to do, what we’re here on Twitch watching, and so it’s one of the most popular types of sponsorship out there.
GamePlay sponsorship is simply when a marketing agency employed by a game production company has popular streamers play their new game upon release. This works well as a Twitch sponsorship option, since it gives viewers a chance to enjoy watching a new game being played, as well as ‘trying it out’ before buying.
From the biggest blockbuster games – like FIFA, League of Legends, Halo, and Minecraft – to unlikely, yet wildly popular indies – such as Fortnite, Fall Guys and PUBG – you can bet that they’re employing some level of GamePlay sponsorship in their brand marketing campaigns.
Affiliate Links
Affiliate marketing is everyone’s best friend. It’s super affordable for sponsors to run, and is fairly hassle-free on the part of the content creator and influencer. Interestingly, however, it’s not always well adapted to Twitch, and tends instead to do better on other streaming platforms like YouTube.
Affiliate marketing is where a sponsor asks you to promote a particular product or service of theirs, and to include a link to buy that product or service in your Twitch panel. Every time somebody clicks on that link and makes a purchase, you get a certain percentage of the company’s profits.
These percentages often also work on a sliding scale, so the more of the product or service you direct your viewers to buy, the bigger the cut of the profits you get. A win-win situation for both sponsor and streamer!
As we’ve said, however, it’s much more likely that a YouTube viewer or blog reader will click on an affiliate link than a Twitch viewer will bother to look at a streamer’s panel, let alone click on a link there. As such, GamePlay, hosted ads and brand displays may be a more secure means of monetising your Twitch channel than affiliate links.
Hosting Ads
One of the most common and effective ways to make money from Twitch sponsors is to host their ads, or actively discuss the brand, its products, and its services.
These ads might be pre-roll ads which display before each new streaming session begins, they could be in-stream ads which run whilst you’re playing, or they might be more organic, natural ads where a streamer – during a casual conversation with their audience – discusses their sponsor, and actively encourages their audience to engage with it. If done well, this last mode of hosting ads can make you a lot of money.
As we’ll discuss in the next section – A Complete Guide to How Much Money Twitch Sponsors Pay – the amount of money you can make from hosting ads depends on how many people actually see or hear your advertisement. This is generally determined by how many concurrent viewers (CCVs) you have on average, rather than your total viewers.
Product Placement
Product placement is an advertising tactic as old as time. Remember that Starbucks coffee that made it into HBO’s Game of Thrones? Well, okay, not quite that.
Product placement refers to brands paying to have their logo and/or products prominently placed in content so that viewers can’t help but be exposed to them.
In terms of Twitch streaming, this could take the form of you wearing a specific set of branded headphones, using a branded keyboard, sitting in a branded chair, or wearing a brand’s t-shirt (like Ninja wearing Red Bull merch).
The amount you’d be paid for this type of sponsorship depends on many different factors, which we’ll discuss next!
How much money do Twitch sponsors pay? A complete breakdown!
Okay, now to the information you’re all really here for! We’ve learned how you can find Twitch sponsors, who can apply for sponsorship, and what kind of things you might have to do to get paid. But at the end of the day, how much money are you actually going to take home?
Factors Impacting How Much a Twitch Sponsor Will Pay
There are quite a few different elements which influence how much any given sponsorship is likely to pay, and it’s important to know going into this section that there is rarely such a thing as a ‘set rate’ in the esports and streaming industries.
How much you’re likely to make through a Twitch sponsorship depends on the following factors:
- The popularity of your Twitch channel, or size of your audience
- Your average CCVs (concurrent viewers, or people watching you at any given moment)
- The sponsor’s marketing budget
- How compatible your audience is to the brand sponsor and their products/services
Now that we know what factors go into the decision making process between sponsors and gaming influencers, let’s take a look at some specific examples of how much money Twitch sponsors pay for different types of sponsorship deals and brand campaigns.
How Much Do Affiliate Marketing Deals on Twitch Pay?
We’ve already touched on how affiliate marketing works, and how payment works, but let’s go back over it.
Each time one of your viewers clicks through on an affiliate link in your Twitch panel and completes a purchase, you’ll get a certain percentage of the profit that your sponsor company makes.
For example, if a gaming chair you’re linking to costs $500, you might get 10% of every sale, or $50 every time someone uses your affiliate link to buy it.
Sometimes this might even work on a sliding scale, so that you make 10% on the first 100 sales, 15% on the next 101-300, 25% on sales 301-500, and 50% on all sales after the first 500.
By the very nature of this type of sponsorship, it’s impossible to gauge how much money you’ll make until you know the details of the sponsorship: what the product is, how much it costs, and how likely it is that your viewers will go and buy it using your link.
Typically, however, affiliate marketing sponsorship deals are implemented at the same time as advertising sponsorships…
How Much do Advertising Sponsorships on Twitch Pay?
Ads remain one of the simplest and most effective of marketing strategies used during brand campaigns. Here at Mindfuture, they make up the backbone of our brand-to-influencer business model. What’s more, we have a very simple and accessible sliding-scale payment scheme for our content creators.
Mindfuture’s mission is to ensure that everyone – no matter whether they have 10 concurrent viewers on average or 10,000 – is able to make some money through our brand partnerships. We work with brands all around the world, some small, some big, who are always looking for exposure on Twitch.
When you sign up to Twitch sponsorship through Mindfuture, you’ll be able to pick and choose from brands which your channel’s size gives you access to. The bigger your channel grows, the more brand campaigns you’ll be able to get involved with.
Our rate of pay to streamers and content creators is also much higher than the average for ad-hosting. We have various payout models in place. The sky’s the limit. All you have to do is work hard on organically growing your audience, and the sliding scale will forever work in your favour.
How Much do GamePlay Sponsorships on Twitch Pay?
GamePlay sponsorships aren’t so different in terms of pay to more ad-focused brand campaigns; the key difference being that how long you play a sponsored game for will (usually) directly impact the amount of money you’re going to make.
Whereas Mindfuture offers a set sliding scale of payments to our content creators for their work, GamePlay sponsorships (often established independently, or directly with the client game manufacturer) can differ greatly in price.
Securing a GamePlay sponsorship can be a big deal, and the amount the game manufacturer or marketing agency is willing to pay will depend on the size of your audience, how long you’ll be playing the game, and how big their marketing budget is. Ultimately, GamePlay sponsorships pay out different amounts depending on the contract.
Whilst there is no ‘set amount’, a general rule is to set your personal influencer rate based on your average number of concurrent viewers (CCVs), at a rate of £1, €1, or $1 per CCV per hour.
To give an example, if you’re pitching to a potential GamePlay sponsorship and you have on average 100 concurrent viewers, then you might want to pitch a rate of £/€/$100 per hour.
Length of Twitch Sponsorships
Twitch sponsorships should always involve the signing of a contract. This protects you, the content creator, and the sponsor. In that contract will usually be an explicit period of time over which the brand campaign will run, and you will be legally obligated to host an ad (or multiple ads), play a specific game (GamePlay), wear or display certain merch, or run an affiliate marketing link in your Twitch panel.
Here at Mindfuture, the length of our gamer-brand partnerships depends on the KPIs and budgets of our brand clients. If they have specific goals (like 1,000,000 ad views and 50,000 qualified click-throughs) then the campaign (and your involvement in it) may only run as long as it takes to achieve those goals. In other circumstances, a brand may wish to run a campaign for 3 months and no longer, or play it by ear.
The good news for you Twitch streamers is that Mindfuture gives you the freedom to choose which sponsorships you want: which would appeal to your audience, which you’d feel comfortable representing, which would make you the most money. This way, you’ll have plenty of choice in terms of sponsorship length.
We look out for our gamers, just like we look out for our brands. Together, we thrive.
How to make more money from Twitch sponsorships
There’s only one rule when it comes to increasing the amount of money you make from Twitch sponsors, and that’s to grow your channel and your audience.
Hear this, and you’re likely to think: I need to get as many viewers and subscribers as possible right now!
But that’s not the way to go about it. Sponsors want to feel certain that their money is being spent wisely.
They want to know that their ads, product placements and affiliate links will be shown to as many people as possible, yes, but they also want to feel like those people will want to interact with their brand because the influencer wants to.
What this means for you is that the best way to get bigger, higher-paying Twitch sponsorships is to grow your audience organically, whilst ensuring that your focus is on longevity, rather than instant, temporary success.
Growing your Twitch audience organically and becoming a full-time content creator/gaming influencer
It takes a heck of a lot of work to become a full-time content creator on Twitch. As we stated in the introduction, only around 0.001% of Twitch streamers make $900 USD per month or more.
However, with gaming agencies like Mindfuture looking out for the little guy, one could argue that making a career out of streaming and sponsorship deals has never been more possible.
Here’s how to grow your audience organically to make more money from Twitch sponsors in the long run:
- Focus on your Concurrent Viewers:Total Viewers ratio, instead of just on total viewers or subscribers.
- The amount of money you’ll make from Twitch sponsorships almost always correlates directly to your average number of CCVs, therefore these are far more important than your ‘total views’ or number of subscribers.
- For example, if you have 500 subscribers but only 10 CCVs, and someone else has 100 subscribers and 50 CCVs, that other person will make more money than you.
- Put the emphasis of your Twitch channel on entertainment and bringing value to your audience, rather than spamming the viewers you have with ads and sponsorship deals.
- Twitch viewers watch gamers because they find them fun, funny, empathetic, relatable and/or likeminded, they don’t watch them for their ads.
- Make sure that you focus on growing your channel organically before you start worrying about monetising it.
- Know when to begin looking for sponsorships for your Twitch channel.
- At Mindfuture, you can begin monetising your Twitch channel from the early stages, and for many of our dedicated content creators this has worked wonders.
- At the same time, it’s important that you consider the value you’re bringing to your audience before you jump into monetisation. Is it likely to be received well? Or do you not have a good enough rapport, or a large enough following, to pull it off?
- Waiting a little longer might allow you to establish a firmer hold over your viewership, and leverage that to greater, more profitable effect further down the line.
How to apply for Twitch sponsorship?
Thank you so much for taking the time to read our Mindfuture blog on how much money Twitch sponsors pay. We sincerely hope it’s helped inform and educate you, maybe even inspire you to begin your own business as a freelance Twitch streamer, gaming influencer, and sponsored content creator.
With Mindfuture, the process of applying for Twitch sponsorship has never been easier. Seriously. All you have to do is click here, authorise your Twitch account, and then choose a brand campaign to get involved with from your Mindfuture content creator dashboard. Simple as that!
If, however, you’ve got a brand in mind that we don’t work with, and you want to approach them independently (perhaps you feel your specific audience would be a great audience for their products, or you already use their services and want to make some money from doing so), then you’ll have to know how write one heck of a sponsorship proposal.
Thankfully, you’re once more in luck. We’ve also curated an entire blog post teaching gamers how to write the pitch perfect sponsorship proposal. Why not go check it out!
Once again, thank you for reading. Good luck with your Twitch sponsorships. We hope to see you join the Mindfuture team soon, and start earning some serious money.
