Livestreaming has surged in recent years. Twitch accounted for 6 billion hours of live watch-time in Q1, per a recent Streamlabs and Stream Hatchet report. And 808 million of those hours were in the ‘Just Chatting’ category, the platform’s catch-all hub for non-gamers.
As more creators from a diversity of genres embrace livestreaming, some describe the medium as a nostalgic way to intimately connect with fans in a fleeting era of TikTok swipes. Many creators also credit livestreaming as their chief source of income.
Lawtubers, or YouTube creators who share pro legal analyses, saw massive earnings spikes during the Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard defamation trial, with the platform’s three top creators each banking six figures by streaming proceedings daily.
The majority of these earnings come from Super Chats, a tipping tool unveiled by YouTube in 2017 that enables viewers to have their comments emphasized during broadcasts.
In addition to VTubers (and Lawtubers), pastors are another top-earning contingency when it comes to Super Chat, per to Playboard, which uses bots to track viewer spend. One top YouTube televangelist, the Nigerian pastor Jerry Eze, made $80,000 on his YouTube channel in one month, he said, with the majority coming from Super Chat.
Other creators are finding other lucrative niches in the live space.
Musician Harry Mack said fans can suggest different words he might use in his freestyle raps, with monthly streams fetching between $4,000 and $8,000. (Read more about how he built his business.)
And Aussie sleepfluencer Jakey Boehm earned $34,000 in one month via TikTok Live, where fans pay to thwart his rest – turning on neon lights, for example, or loud music.
Brands are also embracing TikTok Live, paying three times as much for sponsored streams as compared to static posts. That said, social shopping – a massive industry in Asia – has yet to deliver in the west.
Amazon, for instance, has seen mixed results. Some influencers, like fashion and DIYer Tamara Bradshaw, have earned six figures by hawking products on Amazon Live, a three-year-old social shopping hub. But others are ditching the program, citing lackluster viewership and in converting actual sales.
Insider has spoken with a handful of creators, startups, and industry insiders about the rise of livestreaming and how creators are making money by going live.
