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This has been a tough week for Twitch as a majority of their private company information has been leaked. The powerhouse in streaming was exposed on Wednesday when a 125GB torrent link was posted on 4chan revealing virtually every detail of their technical infrastructure and stored data including the Twitch top earners since 2019. There was no further indication that any user login details or fragile personal info were released.
As per Twitch’s Twitter account, they released a statement confirming this leak. To be specific, the leaks included the platform’s source code and commit history, the internal AWS services used by Twitch, proprietary SDKs, Twitch-owned properties like CurseForge, and some internal security tools. However, this destructive exposé has been overshadowed by the fact that the salaries of the platform’s most popular name brand streamers have all been revealed.
10 Twitch Top Earners
These payouts are from August 2019 to October 2021.
10. LIRIK
- 2.8M followers
- $2,984,653.70
This German-born Boston-based streamer named Saqib Ali Zahid is one of the platform’s most-watched variety channels. He gained success from his World of Warcraft and DayZ gameplays back in 2011 and has amassed a large audience of 2.8 million followers. In 2017 it was reported that he made $200,000 from just his subscribers alone. He usually plays games like TrackMania, Battlefield 2042, Far Cry 6, and the most recent Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl. He averages about 200K to half a million views per daily upload, skipping Thursdays.
9. auronplay
- 10.3M followers
- $3,053,341.54
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This Spanish streamer Raul Alvarez Genes can boast to be the third-highest subscribed channel on Twitch. He took his name from a Final Fantasy X character Auron, although he spends most of his time playing Minecraft, Far Cry 6, and just chatting with his massive audience of 10.3 million followers. He is known for trying to bring comedy and socially relevant commentary to his daily audience of about 2-3 million. You might not tune in if you don’t speak Spanish but the numbers don’t lie, he is one of the most popular on the platform.
8. Altoar
- $3,053,839.94
As Germany’s biggest streamer, Altoar is recently known for developing his own Twitch plugin called SoundAlerts, which has recently surpassed 1.7 million installs from Twitch users. The plugin is mostly used by the biggest streamers to set up audio alerts for certain actions on their streams. Altoar doesn’t have that many followers, but he gets 20% of the generated revenue from use of the SoundAlerts plugin. This has placed him at number 8 on the list.
7. TimTheTatman
- 7M followers
- $3,290,133.32
Timothy John Betar is a very popular streamer that usually indulges in FPS games and World of Warcraft, which has seen his following grow substantially in recent years. In December of 2019, he signed an exclusive contract with Twitch and has since been sponsored by the Audio-Technica Corporation and often appears alongside the platform’s biggest streamers like Dr. Disrespect and CouRageJD. He streams daily and varies in his content from time to time, sometimes just chilling while other times playing his signature FPS games. He averages in the high hundred thousands for each stream.
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6. ludwig
- 3M followers
- $3,290,777.55
This streamer has gone a long way from attending local Super Smash Bros Melee tournaments in Arizona where he went to college. His Melee success was notable as he won games against some top players in the world, but later he went on to do gameplay commentary. He began to organize tournaments with enticing cash prizes in his Worldwide Ludwig Ahgren Championship Series.
His claim to fame was his subathon which he held on March 14 where he streamed continuously for 31 days capturing his sleeping habits along with virtually every second of his personal life. He started with 30,000 paid subscribers and ended with a massive 283,061 subscribers, beating Ninja’s record of 269,154, making him the highest-subscribed account on the platform.
5. NICKMERCS
- 3.1M followers
- $5,096,642.12
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Nicholas Kolcheff, originally from Detroit, Michigan, has gained a lot of following from playing the top battle royale games like Fortnite Battle Royale, Call of Duty: Warzone, and Apex Legends. He started off playing Gears of War and Halo professionally before starting his own YouTube channel and joining the Los Angeles-based gaming organization 100 Thieves and breaking the world record of kills in a squad round of Fortnite, being 54.
He later joined the famous FaZe clan and has amassed $130,000 of prize money from Fortnite competitions. He is known for his aggressive and tactical gaming style, often creating rivalries with other streamers. He currently sticks with Twitch and averages about half a million to a million views per daily upload.
4. Tfue
- 10.6M followers
- $5,295,582.44
Perhaps you’ve heard of this next streamer, the ex-FaZe clan member Turner Tenney who rose to fame playing Fortnite professionally. He originally played games like Call Of Duty and H1Z1, but later transitioned to playing Fornite Battle Royale with the FaZe clan, only to later have a falling out due to disputes of him getting pressured and encouraged to do dangerous stunts and not getting paid enough for this branded videos.
After leaking the contract he had with them, they sued him and they broke ties forever, leaving him to vie for himself in the gaming world. So far he’s been doing great as he’s amassed almost 11 million followers averaging from 100K to 500K views on his daily broadcasts.
3. summit1g
- 5.9M followers
- $5,847,541.17
Summit1g calls himself a variety streamer (kind of), but mostly likes to stream himself playing first-person shooters or open world type games. The 26-year-old gamer’s real name is Jaryd Russel Lazar and he is a retired Counter-Strike: Global Offensive player from Colorado Springs, Colorado. He became popular on Twitch playing CS:GO and WarZ or Infestation: Survivor Stories, with his most recent broadcasts seeing him play a game called Foxhole, a cooperative sandbox massively multiplayer action-strategy game that plays like a real-time strategy war game.
He streams daily with broadcasts ranging from 5 hours to a whopping 19 hours, averaging about half a million views per stream. Catch him playing a wide variety of games from Escape From Tarkov to GTA V to Valorant to Foxhole every day when he goes live!
2. xQcOW
- 9.3M followers
- $8,454,427.17
This oddly named streamer rose to fame by competing for Team Canada in the Overwatch World Cup in 2017, 2018, and 2019. Since he was controversially released from a Texas team called Dallas Fuel, he has taken to playing a wide variety of mostly new games while also taking the time to just watch interesting videos and chat with his audience.
His real name is Felix Lengyel and he is a 25-year-old Canadian streamer who lives in Texas and does Twitch as a full-time job for the Canadian esports organization Luminosity Gaming. Usually, he hosts walkthroughs of new releases that seem tough or fun to play, boasting that he can “play and win at every game.” He posts daily streams that can go up to 12 hours in duration, each garnering him about 1.7-1.8 million views per. When it comes to streaming, Felix is definitely the master of engagement and diverse content.
1. CriticalRole
- 830.2K followers
- $9,626,712.16
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CriticalRole is not the most followed account on Twitch but it surely has pulled in the most cash for its content. The CriticalRole crew is composed of various professional voice actors who play Dungeons and Dragons campaigns and improvise their roles as they go along. You’ll find them voicing a diverse set of characters who go on adventures within the kingdom every week on Twitch, averaging about half a million to a million views per video. Their third campaign of the famous Dungeons and Dragons role-playing board game has been announced and their engagement is only going to grow in the months to come.
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YouTube Top Earners
It’s interesting to know that the top earner on Twitch outshines the top earner on YouTube, which is a considerably larger platform. There are some cross-platform pollinators like moistcr1tikal and HasanAbi but mostly the kind of success is very divergent.
The kinds of content that people go to Twitch for is usually what is the most popular on YouTube, but Twitch is more attuned to generate revenue for the streamer than YouTube. Narrowing down the kind of content to just gaming and commentary has afforded Twitch streamers much more profit than any other platform it seems.
Below are the top YouTube earners this past year.
1. pewdiepie: $6,747,833.24
2 .donutmediatv: $6,302,223.92
3. h3podcast: $3.436.563.26
4. 1veritasium: $3,094,603.10
5. linustechtips: $3,058,762.24
6. mrbeast6000: $2,558,022.56
7. unboxtherapy: $2,516,639.14
8. jeromeasf: $2,501,078.74
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Why is it important for us to know who are the Twitch top earners?
The influencer economy is a booming industry that has been used to generate traffic for many popular brands around the world. These influencers have a full-time job promoting products and living aspiration lifestyles either vlogging, playing video games, doing commentary, or anything in between. The best part about it is that most of these influencers are just average people who started making content on the internet and have amassed incredible followings.
To a normal person, they don’t really do anything too difficult in their daily lives. Playing video games or having a funny conversation doesn’t seem like the most valuable set of skills to have, but in today’s climate, it can make you into a millionaire. They are full-time online entertainers that have to live a majority of their lives in the presence of their many intrusive fans in order to make this money.
It’s important to know who is earning the most because it indicates what kinds of things can be a side gig or full-time job for you, the average person. Twitch is open for anyone to try and amass the same kind of following, and knowing how much each of their favorite streamers are making will give them the insight they’ve always cherished.
The Twitch top earners are also the biggest indication of the amount of engagement these streamers get daily. If they have fewer followers but generate lots of money that means they are effective in their daily uploads, and brands should try and sponsor them more than others. The top earnings can be quite a controversial tidbit of information to know about certain people, but it is a solid indicator of how well they are each doing.
To note, these earnings don’t account for the AdSense or sponsorships, so they can be making up to double the amount you see. But as a raw number based on their subscriber and follower counts, it is the strongest indication of their true popularity on the platform.
