THE income of streamers, influencers, and content creators has long been a fascination of many.
The idea that someone on Twitch or YouTube could earn millions of pounds every year from the comfort of their own home is something we all want for ourselves.
However, only the streamers at the very top of the industry can bring in that kind of money. That begs the question, who are those people?
For a long time, it seemed like that question would never be answered, but an unlikely source came along in October 2021.
After a major security breach at Twitch, hackers posted the earnings of the top streamers from August 2019 to October 2021.
These numbers include how much a channel has earnt through subscriptions and donations but, most importantly, don’t include Twitch’s cut.
All this revealed that the top earner on Twitch, which made £8 million in that two-year period is the channel known as .
So what do they stream that’s so engaging to viewers the world over? Dungeons and Dragons.
Yes, that roleplaying game, also known as D&D, that is so often depicted in media as being something only the nerdiest of nerds play has become far more mainstream than you may have realised.
Critical Role started in 2012 but didn’t start streaming on Twitch until 2015 when they began to stream their games weekly.
They quickly became the number one D&D channel on the internet, with their cast having fantastic improv and drama skills, breathing life into their characters and the world.
Their knack for telling engaging stories has earned them over a million followers on Twitch and roughly 500k views per episode across all platforms.
Looking in from the outside, they may not seem like your traditional Twitch channel.
Rather than a single streamer, there are eight main cast members and a whole team working behind the scenes to broadcast twice a week.
Twitch is far from their only revenue stream, their YouTube channel has almost 2 million followers, and they take donations.
85% of these donations go to various charities, while 15% is kept to fund the channel. This is on top of a wide array of merchandise.
They’ve grown to projects outside of playing D&D too. In 2019 they launched a Kickstarter campaign for an animated series, The Legend of Vox Machina.
This campaign was a roaring success, earning £6.6 million and is available now on Amazon Prime.
How much the team earns outside of Twitch is unknown, but you can imagine it is of a similar magnitude.
Critical Role goes to show just how lucrative the business of online content creation has become, and while success is extremely unlikely, starting out yourself isn’t so difficult.
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