---
title: 'How a Small Streamer Made $14,000: 8 Revenue Streams Explained'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=0ELCCp7HV0s'
video_id: '0ELCCp7HV0s'
date: 2026-07-11
duration_sec: 813
---

# How a Small Streamer Made $14,000: 8 Revenue Streams Explained

> Source: [How a Small Streamer Made $14,000: 8 Revenue Streams Explained](https://youtube.com/watch?v=0ELCCp7HV0s)

## Summary

A small Twitch streamer with under 10,000 followers breaks down every revenue stream he's used over three years, from Twitch ads and subscriptions to donations, sponsorships, multistreaming, merch, affiliate marketing, and a platform called Drop. He reveals exact earnings, fees, and strategies that worked or flopped, totaling around $14,000 before expenses.

### Key Points

- **Twitch Ad Revenue** [00:15] — Twitch pays 55% of ad revenue; streamer makes $0.50–$3 per stream, totaling $684.77 since 2021.
- **Subscriptions and Bits** [01:06] — 107 subscribers earn ~$250/month; bits total $2,772.35. Top 10 people account for 40% of all Twitch payouts.
- **YouTube Earnings** [02:36] — 125 videos, 300k views, $0 earned (not monetized). Friend with 81M views made $925.49 (RPM $0.11).
- **Viewer Donations** [03:31] — Donations via Streamlabs/PayPal: $7,647.41 total, but over $500 lost to PayPal fees (over 7%). Donathon raised $3,000.
- **Sponsored Streams** [05:16] — Worked with Raid Shadow Legends, Chess.com, Fortnite, Burger King, etc. Stream Elements campaigns earned $500–$1,000 total.
- **Multistreaming to Kick** [06:26] — 9 months multistreaming to Kick earned $889. Kick offers 100% sub revenue vs Twitch's 50%.
- **Merch Sales** [07:35] — Used Fourth Wall; lost $50 due to poor design and free shipping mistake. Plans to improve.
- **Affiliate Marketing** [08:46] — Earned $191 from affiliate links (Rubik's cubes, NordVPN, Fortnite code). Recommends promoting products you use.
- **Drop Platform** [10:34] — Favorite monetization method: $2,187.42 earned. Pays for wishlists, shoutouts, etc. Requires 250 followers.
- **Total Earnings and Hourly Wage** [12:08] — Total $14,000 before expenses and taxes. 750 streams, 2,400 hours live → ~$12/hour.

### Conclusion

Small streamers can diversify income across multiple platforms, but consistency and avoiding high fees (like PayPal) are crucial. The creator's top earners were donations and Drop, while YouTube and merch flopped.

## Transcript

made as a small streamer with just under 10,000 followers and I'm not just I'm going to show you everything that has made me money as a small streamer in the past 3 years starting off with the most obvious one what twitch pays me now
the only thing twitch pays directly for is to run ads on my channel now big streamers get these special ad offers that encourage extra ads and offer more money I don't get that since my channel is too small but I can't choose how many
minutes of ads I run per hour the standard is 3 minutes which is also how many minutes of ads you need to disable pre-roll ads on your channel it stream there won't be any ad at the start but there will be ad breaks after
you start watching twitch gives 55% of AD Revenue shown on my own channel which I think equals to around $350 per 1,000 ads viewed that means I make between a half and $3 every stream depending on how long I'm live for that means in
total since I started streaming in 2021 I've made I've made $684 77 in ad revenue from twitch also ads are a large part of big streamers income just listen to this I make up
most of my money on Twitch through ads and twitch turbo alone but for small insignificant Revenue sources next up is subscriptions and bits which is the second way twitch pays you directly subscribing to a streamer costs $5 which
gives you some cool perks and the streamer 50% around $1 to $3 depending on where in the world you subscribe from right now I have 107 subscribers which means I make around $250 a month just from Subs alone when watching streams
people can also donate bits which is a digital currency only found on Twitch for every 100 bits donated the streamer gets $1 to date I've received $277,200 bits which totals $2,772 35 over half of this has come
from three people alone which brings me to my next point you see most small streamers biggest income is big donators one person or a few people being very generous on my Channel 10 people are responsible for 884 subscribers and over
200,000 bits which together makes up around 40% of everything I've made from twitch payouts ever so shout out to my top gifters you're awesome for some Subs I've had in total but adding together my ads subscriptions and my
bits I have in total made $1,118 And1 aside from twitch I have another seven Reven new sources some of these have worked very well for me and others have totally flopped I want to show you both what has and what hasn't
worked for me now keep in mind what works for me might not work for others and vice versa of course starting off with YouTube where I've uploaded 125 videos most of which are shorts and in total gotten around 300,000 views and so
total gotten around 300,000 views and so far I've made a total of well 0 because I'm not monetized yet please subscribe maybe we'll get there but that's okay because I want to show you both what does and what doesn't work for me now
just because I haven't made any money from this doesn't mean YouTube is a bad friend of mine who does very well on YouTube with Minecraft shorts and he was kind enough to share some behind the-scenes statistics on his channel as
you can see in the past year he's gotten 81 million views which he's made $925 4.93 from he has a RPM of 11 cents which basically means he makes 11 cents per 1,000 views on on any of his videos next
up is what I've made the most money from this year but also the most uncertain one on this list viewer donations now anyone can type exclamation mark donate in my twitch chat and donate any amount of money for it to pop up on screen like
of money for it to pop up on screen like this difficult it's so much difficult to real now you can obviously just set up a donation button or link and call it a
day but something I've done to encourage donations which is worked very well is events like a donathon I did one for my birthday around a month ago where for every $1 donated I would be live for another 2 minutes it went very well and
we ended up being live for over a week and made just under $3,000 if you want to do events like these I suggest not doing them too often me personally do them once maybe twice a year at most to keep people interested
and to not appear like a total sellout I also think it's really important that you set up fun goals for these streams I try my best to have interesting and original ones for my streams at least and so far that has worked out really
well if you want to set up donations for yourself there is options like streamlabs and stream elements they both do the same I personally use streamlabs I'll link them below luckily streamlabs doesn't take a fee and the money goes
straight to my PayPal unfortunately the fees on PayPal are a bit higher they fees on PayPal are a bit higher they claim their fees are 3.4% plus 30 but claim their fees are 3.4% plus 30 but that is just not true I've in total made
$764 741 from donations since I started over $500 of which are gone directly in fees to PayPal that's over 7% but that is not all PayPal also has other fees
[Music] like moving on I want to talk about sponsored streams a common misconception is that sponsors and brand deals are for bigger streamers only now that's strong and I'm going to show you both how I get
my sponsorships and how much they pay as a streamer I've of course worked with raid Shadow Legends they pay very well some other brands I've worked with are chess.com fortnite Burger King raid Shadow Legends a bunch of indie games
and even more Minecraft servers now one of the easiest way to get sponsorships is via stream elements I've done three sponsored campaigns with them but for just don't get offers from from them
anymore regardless how it works is you get offers that usually require you to stream the game and get viewers to download the game and you get paid accordingly sadly I'm not allowed to share exactly how much each campaign
pays but from the three campaigns I've done I have in total made between $500 and $1,000 stream elements also announced that streamers with 10 plus viewers have made an average of $570 with their campaigns I'll link them
them out and get some sponsors for yourself next up I want to talk about kick or multi-streaming as a whole I only ever multistream to kick so I'm going to focus on that multistreaming can be a
great way of growing your audience which is also why I really want to start multi enough followers to do it yet I multi streamed to kick for around 9 months between June 2023 and March 2024 which means whenever I went live on Twitch I
would also simultaneously go live on Kick I did this simply because kick offered a more competitive Vue split you see while twitch shares sub Revenue 50/50 with the crater kick doesn't take anything which means the only money I
didn't receive was the transaction fees so if I encourage my community to subscribe to me on Kick instead of on Twitch it would cost them the exact same $5 but I would get over twice as much money another upside I discovered with
away opposed to on Twitch where you need to hit a $50 minimum payout or you're not getting your money now multistreaming to kick worked very well over over the 9 months I did it I made $889 which will add to our total fifth
on the list is making and selling merch there's obviously a lot of ways to do this but I think the best way for streamers is to do it via fourth wall they are a streamer merch site that handle pretty much everything for you
all you need to do is choose the products and designs and they handle the rest they're also great as they have other features like memberships which is similar to patreon and social media Integrations like twitch so it can alert
on stream whenever you get sales if you want to check them out I'll leave a link to them below now the one time I tried making merch I absolutely messed up I bought some samples and some stickers which I absolutely overpaid for and it
turned out horrible I also accidentally managed to give everyone free shipping so even though I got a decent amount of sales I ended up losing like 50 bucks future I'm obviously going to be a lot more careful and then I think the second
thing I do differently is spend a lot more time on making a good design as I think that's one of the most important factors for Creator merch so if anyone watching is a good merch designer please join my Discord I need your help next up
is affiliate links and affiliate marketing now you don't need to be a Creator to do this but it's a very common matchup as creators already have an audience to monetize now if you don't know what affiliate marketing is it
basically means you sell someone else's product and get paid a commission for every sale the first time I did affiliate marketing was with my Rubik's Cube YouTube channel around 5 years ago this Rubik's Cube online store would
give me a discount code and a referral link and for every sale through this link and for every sale through this link I would get A2 store voucher so I obviously didn't make any real money but it was enough to secure me a lifetime
supply of free Rubik's Cubes 12-year-old me was absolutely over the moon for this so I very much recommend it Amazon also has a very good and popular affiliate system I don't use them though but I would suggest checking them out at some
point I also had a nordvpn affiliate link but I only got like two or three sales before I gave up you can also use code Johnny macaron in the fortnite item shop which means for every 10,000 v-bucks anyone spend I make $5 which
isn't a lot of money but I'm sure it'll add up over time the best way to do affiliate marketing as a small streamer in my opinion is by getting affiliate links for platforms or products that you yourself use like your PC setup or some
software you use in my case drop for example which I'll get back to I also like to stick to products that I actually use as I don't want to promote something that I don't actually believe in from these affiliate links I've made
$191 which isn't a lot but I've also gotten a lot more than 190 bucks worth of freebies thanks to affiliate links I do want to get better at this though so maybe I'll make another video on it in the future the final point on my list is
drop which is this website for streamers to make money while rewarding their communities you sign up for campaigns where you get paid to stream a game or give them a shout out there's also a third action where you share a link with
your community and anyone that clicked the link can complete simple tasks like wishlisting a steam game or subscribing to a YouTube channel anytime someone does this via your link you get paid for example this campaign that I just signed
example this campaign that I just signed up to pays $160 for every user that wish lists a steam game the user also gets points which they can use to win gift cards so it's a win-win really this website actually shows publicly how much
creators on there make so if you don't believe me you can just go check it out for yourself I've used this site on and off for a few months now since I discovered it and from that I have made 2,18
$742 to get access as a Creator on this website you only need 250 followers on leave a referral Link in the description and we both get $10 each if you sign up
drop is definitely my favorite way to monetize and I don't think many know about this website so I'd very much suggest checking them out also they send me stickers so they're pretty cool anyways my goal with streaming is
why I try so many different ways to monetize my content it is also why I headed over to my twitch and dropped a follow I stream every single day and we
are getting so close to 10,000 followers so I would really appreciate it now before we add up how much I've made in total there is a few things I want to mention consistency is 100% key between August 2023 and July 2024 I've only had
one week off twitch aside from that I have streamed every single day so being active all the time definitely helps that being said though take breaks it's definitely healthy I don't think streaming non-stop for a year is very
to struggle with burnout if you try to do the same I do too don't worry now do the same I do too don't worry now let's add together Everything YouTube let's add together Everything YouTube twitch sponsors kick donations merch
twitch sponsors kick donations merch sales Affiliates and drope summing them up I have in total during my threeyear long stream career made
expenses and taxes I've done around 750 streams and just over 2,400 hours live which means my hourly wage on streams ignoring any other work I've done have been around $12 per hour now as a Minecraft streamer I also started my own
Minecraft server which I stream from this also makes money but we'll break that down and I'll show you all the behind the scenes in another video thank behind the scenes in another video thank you for watching