A thing I am too old to understand, is the twitch emote economy.
Twitch famously allocates bandwidth based on channel popularity, the more viewers you get on average the better servers you get. This is scarcity imposed on the creator's side, and totally expected.
In addition to these lower latency, higher resolution benefits tied to viewer count, twitch streamers also get a tiered access to emotes.
Emotes used to only be available to partners, and then affiliated streamers could use them tied to subscribers.
This imposed scarcity, your limit of however many lil emotes you get to use based on how big your audience is, makes them valuable.
Unlocking new emojis becomes an incentive in itself, for both streamers and their audience.
Twitch streamers mention gifted subs a lot. A gifted sub means someone paid to buy a subscription for another person. This costs $5 each for a basic subscription. The streamer gets about half of this amount.
So, now that you know this, watching a twitch streamer will hit different. You'll see people spending literally hundreds of dollars to get their name said aloud. The streamer receiving hundreds of dollars an hour in income, etc.
"Wow, XxXRottenSawsageXxX, 100 gifted subs, thank you!"
Rotten Sausage just spent $500, the streamer just made $250. And 5 minutes later will thank another person for 50 subs, another for 20, etc.
The very most popular streamers can make a *lot* of money. The rest, almost everyone else, will make a hell of a lot less money.
The company profits by fostering parasociality.
Watch a big streamer for an hour and they might easily call out 500+ subs, netting them $250/hr.
Many of the people who donated, did so because they felt a deep, personal connection to the streamer, and will continue donating to maintain that special relationship.
In general, the top 200 streamers make over $250,000 a year.
Top 400 bottoms out at $150,000 a year.
The other 99.99% pretty much make less than median household income.
