When starting out streaming, most people start it as a hobby, while others from the word ‘go’ see it as an opportunity to get some extra income. Whatever your approach to streaming, there are many different ways that you can monetize your stream and make some more income from it and perhaps even a full-living wage.
In this article, we will go through various ways you can monetize as a live streamer and how you would set it up.
What is monetization?
Monetization is a way to generate revenue from your streams. Whether it’s while you’re online or offline, there are ways to do this.
The most popular ways to generate income are through donations/tips, subscriptions, advertising revenue (if you’re an affiliate), sponsorships, brand deals, merchandise, digital goods, and other partner/affiliate programs.
How do I start monetizing my content?
It is effortless to start monetizing your content via donations/tips. All you need to do is decide how and set it up!
No, it really is that simple. For example, if you wish to set up donations or tips, you can use streaming services such as StreamElements, Streamlabs, or a PayPal.me donation link. Most people today have a PayPal account, which is the bare minimum you need to start taking those tips/donations; how you start accepting them is up to you.
Suppose you’re using a streaming service like SE.Live (StreamElements) or SLOBS (Streamlabs) will have a dedicated page for tipping, and you just need to open up the settings, link your PayPal account or any other payment method you would like (if supported) and set up the page layout and design.
Monetizing content via subscriptions and bits/cheers is only available to Twitch affiliates and partners. This can be achieved by reaching the goals set by Twitch, which we’ve covered in Becoming a Twitch Affiliate: A Step-by-Step Guide.
Monetising your content via other subscription services
As mentioned, multiple ways to monetize your content include subscription websites such as Patreon.
Services such as Patreon exist so you can offer more to your audience, such as behind-the-scenes content, exclusive content, physical goods, and more!
For a monthly subscription fee, you can generate income from your behind-the-scenes posts and offer benefits such as early access, discord roles, physical gifts, or even something as simple as a thank you at the end of your videos/streams.
Monetizing content via sponsorships, brand deals, and affiliate programs
Sponsorships and brand deals don’t always come at a later time in your content creation career.
Many companies will accept creators of any size, regardless of reach, and will allow you to earn money through their sponsorship, affiliate, or partner programs. Most companies will have an affiliate/partner page where you can submit your application to work with them on their website.
But just because a company will offer you that opportunity, should you take it? I’ll answer this with a maybe. The reason for that is because I always look at an opportunity I receive like this:
- Do I like the brand/product?
- Do the company values align with my morals
- Is the company/product relevant to my content?
- Would it enhance my content?
- Potential success rates for working with said company
These are a couple of things I always consider when working with a brand. You are free to go with all, none, or a selection of brands that offer you deals, but if you just take every opportunity you get, you may appear as a bit of a ‘sellout’ to your audience and may get zero interactions with the campaigns you run. Whereas, if you only do select campaigns (of brands/products that appeal to you) and promote those to your audience, they’ll be more trusting and inclined to check out the brand as they’d be more trusting of you.
Sponsorships and partner programs are more challenging to get involved with than affiliate programs. However, affiliate programs often have few to no requirements, depending on the company.
Besides reaching out to these companies to get the ball rolling, branching out with your content across multiple platforms to increase your reach and gain more eyes on your content was the better way to improve a brands interest in working with me.
Affiliate programs usually have a coupon code for your audience to use and get a certain percentage off, generally around 10%, and you get that 10% of the purchase on your dashboard. Simple, right? There could be other perks where you get free/discounted products with your own unique code, but that will depend heavily on the company and their affiliate program. A lot of streamers have ‘gaming’ energy drink affiliate codes for companies such as Wraith, Sneak, and Dubby, to name a few, but there are other programs out there, not just gamer energy drinks.
Partners are essentially an upgraded version of an affiliate. Joining a company's partner program can include benefits such as free products, paid promotions, involvement in products, and a larger share of the discount code that your audience uses, to name just a few. You might also gain early access to new products for reviews and teasers, helping to build excitement around these items to ensure the company achieves a more impactful launch of their latest offerings products.
Sponsorships have similar perks to partner programs, but they are generally paid services designed to increase brand visibility and drive more product sales. For example, you might watch a YouTube video and then be cut to an ad spot where they get paid to discuss and promote a product like NordVPN, explains its services and features, and then continues promoting their affiliate link/code at the end to earn money.
Monetising content with merchandise and digital goods
This form of monetization and revenue potential entirely depends on your products, audience size, and cost.
This is not a deterrent, but it is more realistic. Suppose you’ve just started as a content creator and spent hours making the perfect merch design but have nobody to advertise it to. In that case, you’ve just spent all that time—not for nothing, per se, but that time could have been better spent making content, advertising your content, networking, improving your social media presence, etc. But if you would like to make your merch, go for it! Start off with something simple, such as your logo as branding, and it’s as easy as that.
Ideally, you should have a small following before making merchandise for your branding and channels. This way, you could rock that merchandise on stream and social media, and your audience may take that dip into supporting you and getting the merch! You can also host giveaways/discounts on your merchandise to help promote it.
Digital goods are slightly different as you could be using that as your primary source of income, and in that instance, you would want to advertise that as soon as you can without being spammy.
You can sell digital goods as part of your content; for example, you can create artwork (emotes for other creators), graphics, photographs, 3D models, etc., all while being live on Twitch. Although you may be showing how you’re making them, your audience probably wouldn’t be able to recreate what you’re doing as it’s your unique products, and things such as 3D models are incredibly intricate and take many, many hours to make. The entire process of making these goods may not even be made live on Twitch as you’d continue it in your spare time and on stream.
This concludes my guide on different ways of monetizing as a live streamer. Do you have any more ideas? Send them our way, and leave a comment if this helps!
