The MMORPG streamer Asmongold is one of the most well-known content creators on Twitch. However, the platform doesn’t benefit much from it: According to his calculations, Asmongold costs Twitch several million US dollars each year.
This is how expensive Asmongold is: The streamer tried to find out using an online calculator. Previously, Asmongold had seen a similar calculation from his Twitch colleague “PirateSoftware” and concluded: “Dan [Note from the editor: Twitch CEO Dan Clancy] must really hate me.”
So, Asmongold quickly entered his own data into the tool from Amazon IVS. Based on 6 hours of streaming with approximately 20,500 viewers, Twitch is said to incur costs of over $8,000 per stream, which is about 7,400 Euros. In fact, over the last 3 months, Asmongold averaged rather 29,000 viewers (via TwitchTracker).
When calculated over an entire year, during which the streamer goes live on Twitch almost daily, Asmongold costs the platform $2.8 million or nearly 2.6 million Euros per year.
A decision by Asmongold is really expensive for Twitch
Why does Asmongold cost Twitch so much money? When a streamer goes live on Twitch, the streaming platform receives their content and broadcasts it to the viewers. The more data that is transmitted in this way, the more expensive it becomes for Twitch.
Additionally, the platform incurs costs for the servers where VoDs and clips are stored. To offset these costs, Twitch relies on revenue: in the form of advertising that is broadcast on the platform, and the share that Twitch receives from subs (the paid subscriptions).
However, Asmongold hardly streams on his main account with nearly 3.5 million followers in mid-2022 for personal reasons. Instead, the streamer prefers to stream on his secondary account zackrawrr. However, this account is not monetized: he has no subs there and does not run any ads. Thus, Twitch pays for the bandwidth that he uses but likely earns little from him.
What is the problem with that? Twitch is not profitable in its current state, CEO Dan Clancy admitted in January. This situation led to the dismissal of about 500 employees, which amounted to 35% of the workforce.
Furthermore, Twitch is in cost-cutting mode: After already shutting down the VoD feature in South Korea, the platform plans to completely cease operations there on February 27. For the local streamers, this potentially means a difficult decision:
“I lost my job” – Twitch streamer faces the decision to leave the country for her career
