Streaming is about a lot of things — fun, gaming, camaraderie and of course, money. Twitch is still growing rapidly, its audience has expanded by 400% since 2017. With all of those global eyeballs, comes advertising and a consistent stream of funding for streamers who can make the grade. But there is more than one way to skin a cat. Here are some forward-thinking ways to monetize your Twitch stream for the remainder of 2022.
Quality for Twitch Partner
Assuming you meet all of the standards laid out by Twitch for a partner-ready stream, being partnered brings a lot of benefits with it. How to become partner? Not unlike playing a video game with achievements, Twitch has its own achievement system. There are two main tiers of streamer, Affiliate and Partner.
Affiliate Quals
To become a Twitch affiliate, you have to hit the following metrics within a 30 day period:
- Reach 50 followers
- Stream for 8 hours
- Stream on 7 different days
- Average of 3 concurrent viewers
Partner Quals
To reach partner, you have to hit these lofty metrics within a 30 day period.
- Stream for 25 hours
- Stream on 12 different days
- Average of 75 concurrent viewers
*Note: While you can count raids, embeds and hosts, towards your affiliate stats, they do not count towards partner quals. So, no fudging
How to get partner approval
Meeting the quals is just the first step of becoming partner. Everyone who is partnered must pass a manual review. Here, the standards can be a bit murky, as the partner approval process is a subjective one. Partly, the verification is making sure that your concurrent traffic is legit, and not boosted by raids, or embeds. Part of the review looks into the video quality of the stream. Part of the review is content-based – a reviewer may decide that content is inappropriate, or not age appropriate for a wider audience.
According to katliente, Twitch also considers things like your social media following on Twitter and YouTube. Twitch might also consider things like whether your concurrent viewer count is sustainable for more than the initial 30-day measuring period.
If you want to gauge the content of partnered streams against your own, check out SullyGnomes top Partnered streams lists.
Benefits of Twitch partner
While there are a number of non-monetary benefits, like priority customer support and custom transcodes, the main monetary of partner are as follows:
Monetization:
- Channel Subscriptions & emotes: Twitch Partners can earn revenue by accepting subscriptions from their viewers. The subscription options are the Tier 1, Tier 2, or Tier 3 or the Prime Gaming free subscription.
- Bits: Bits are a virtual good viewers can buy to Cheer on your channel, allowing them to support you without leaving Twitch. Twitch provides participating Partners a share of the revenue Twitch receives from Bits equal to 1 cent per Bit used to Cheer for them. As a Partner, you also get to customize your Cheermotes and Bit Badges.
- Ads: Partners earn a share of the revenue generated from any ads played on their channel. Partners can determine the length and frequency of mid-roll advertisements through their dashboard.
Mint your own creator coin
This wouldn’t be a forward-thinking helper if we didn’t talk about crypto. Exchanges like rally.io allow users to mint their own crypto-based creator tokens that their audience can collect & trade in for stream perks. Why coins instead of traditional ad & merchandizing routes? Here’s an answer from rally’s FAQ:
How do creators make money from Coins?
“Coins unlock an economy around the creator’s community by tapping into new methods of platform-agnostic monetization. Not only does it create an engaged community, whose members can spend their creator’s Coin to get exclusive access to content, events, and merch, but they also enable creators to monetize without paying high platform fees. Creators and their community are also able to earn weekly network community rewards in the form of $RLY when their Coin economy is highly engaged.”
“Platform-agnostic monetization” is a fancy way of saying that the reins of your funding stream aren’t all held by Twitch. This can be a good thing, since Twitch has been known to demonetize popular streams with no warning — eg. Amouranth and her wildly popular hot tub streams.
How do you get your own Rally coin?
You can apply to mint your own creator coin here. Unfortunately, not unlike Twitch partnering, you have to be invited — and those invitations are at the discretion of the Rally team.
What makes you more likely to get invited to mint a Rally coin?
According to Rally, “We seek creators with engaged communities, who produce consistent content and have strong ideas about integrating their Coin into their communities.”
Web 3.0 properties like this are so new and dynamic that they know they haven’t figured out every use case yet. So the more forward-thinking and creative you are as a streamer, the more they’re likely to support your ideas for using creator coins.
Get commissions from an affiliate marketing program
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Put simply, affiliate marketing is using your website, social media or stream to sell products from other vendors in exchange for a commission on the sales of those products. One of the most prolific affiliate marketing program is Amazon Associates, which describes itself as “one of the largest affiliate marketing programs in the world.”
What’s a great affiliate marketing program I haven’t heard of?
One of the better new programs out there is The Kosmonaut Progarm run by gamer supplement maker, Kosmic Dust. Unlike more generic affiliate programs like Amazon or the Airbnb Associates program, Kosmic Dust is specifically made for gamers and streamers, so you’ll probably see more success in promoting it on your Twitch stream.
Why should I be a Kosmonaut Ambassador?
Besides the cool dark-themed graphics?
- First of all you’re promoting a gamer-specific product, which is a lot easier to do on Twitch than hocking vegetable steamers.
- Commissions are ridiculously high, up to 30% for highly rated Ambassadors.
- You can get paid out in BTC, ETH, and other crypto currencies via the Kosmonaut Wallet.
- Kosmic Dust also has its own private Discord for affiliates which gives you a built in community where you can share tactics and success stories.
- You can partake in VIP giveaways that get you access to new Kosmic products before everyone else.
- The top 10 Ambassadors will win a trip to the Kosmic House in Miami — which I can only assume is some kind of Willy Wonka-esque labyrinth full of goji berries and l-carnitine.
Audience comes first
Streamer monetization has majorly advanced since the early days in the 2000s. The field of sponsors and affiliates are wider, the competition is stiffer, and attention is that much harder to come by. Make sure you put in the audience building work first, before you start monetizing. You don’t want to alienate or spam your budding audience too much. Once you do start to monetize it, choose your path wisely.
