Twitch. The average Twitch streamer makes between $3,000 to $5,000 each month playing around 40 hours a week. That doesn’t include ad revenue, which averages around $250 for every 100 subscribers.

Twitch’s monetization for streamers is far superior to YouTube Gaming’s. You have tiered subs, gifted subs, donations, bits, and widgets that even let you buy the streamer food. Not only all those things, but the community thrives and encourages supporting your favorite streamer. You go to Twitch to watch live gameplay and you go to YouTube to watch clean, edited, and lasting content.

Monetization

Twitch has focused a lot of time and energy on monetization for its content creators. It’s even super easy to become an affiliate nowadays and get a sub button. This enables your audience to subscribe for only $5 a month to help support your channel. Not only that but Twitch also has bits, which is their fun little currency you can buy to send to a streamer. Donations are also big on twitch and are highly encouraged amongst many communities.

Of course, we can all sit there for free and watch our favorite streamers but if they aren’t making any money then they would be streaming less and less. The Twitch community doesn’t want their streamer to go away so they support them to the end.

YouTube has a massive community…just not mostly focused on gaming. So when you look at YouTube gaming it has a much smaller community that isn’t so much focused on giving their money away. Even if you’re a streamer on YouTube, it is very hard to get partnered and get your “Join” button so that your audience can subscribe to you.

I will say YouTube has awesome customization with its advertisements on your channel. You can charge different amounts for your tiered subscribers but it has a long way to go to overcome its rival Twitch.

Community

As I said before, Twitch’s sole existence is built off of live streams. YouTube is known for edited content catering to their niche. You could have 5,000 viewers on YouTube and 2,000 viewers on Twitch and probably come out with more money from Twitch. Usually, this will depend on your own community though.

The community at Twitch just loves to throw money at their streamers. YouTube is all about free content and ad revenue. If you decide to start out on Twitch, you are much more likely to grow your stream a little and make a minuscule amount of money. Growing your stream larger than that will be near impossible with Twitch.

The YouTube community will put way less money towards streamers overall compared to Twitch. As I said before, YouTube started off as a free content platform for users and that’s what it’s known for. Add in live streaming too that community and it is just another form of free content to them. Of course, you will have those that support their favorite content creator, they are far and few between compared to Twitch.

Both communities are great, just for different reasons. If you’re looking to start streaming then Twitch should be your go-to. Now, if you already have some type of following, whether it be from Instagram, TikTok, or some other social media platform, YouTube could be your golden ticket to increasing your streaming potential.

Discoverability

This is probably the most important section of them all. Both Twitch and YouTube are not easy to get discovered on but one site makes it a lot easier than the other. Each platform makes its attempt at helping new streamers get noticed but there is still a severe lack of results from this actually working.

YouTube Gaming offers more discoverability based on the fact that even one of your past live streams can pop off and gain traction. If the YouTube algorithm loved something about your content, your video could be in a lot of people’s recommended sidebar and bring in a new crowd. Even the browsing section of YouTube is great. I can scroll through and easily find super low view streams near the top and that alone is a huge benefit to streaming on this platform.

Twitch’s attempt at helping smaller streamers is just awful. From what I can see, it will always be the current big streamers bringing in all the money. When browsing Twitch you have a tiny recommended section of streamers and even then these are streamers with some sort of following. There is absolutely nothing for the little people on the platform and no one is scrolling down in the top gaming categories to the 0 viewer streamers.

Now I don’t want to sound completely pessimistic about Twitch. It’s the leading platform in streaming for a reason. A lot of people have tried it out and make a living through Twitch. All I’m saying is that in this day and age you may want to look more towards YouTube to shoot your shot at stardom…..or even just a nice small community.

Twitch will end up supplemental

What does this mean? It means Twitch is on the up-and-coming of being just another platform for supplemental income. You are starting to see big names from all over come to Twitch to play games for their community. You have professional athletes, musicians, actors, and so much more using Twitch to live stream for their audience. This is also just another reason why the smaller creators on Twitch will never stand a chance on this site.

Notice how I did not mention social media influencers. Top influencers from platforms like Instagram and TikTok already have live streaming services via their app. You are already seeing content creators from Twitch leave to go back to their original platform. Once the mainstream social media apps launched their “Go Live” feature, there was a large drop in the top viewed stream on Twitch.

Are you just streaming?

There are a ton of different ways to look and this and go about it. This is where YouTube is king and discoverability comes back into play. If you have videos on your YouTube channel and not just live streaming content, then you have a much higher chance of being discovered. Way more of a chance than Twitch. A lot of people will even take their live stream content, edit it, and make a clean video out of it with a catchy title. Do this! Do other things than just live stream if this is really something you want to do.

I can’t tell you how many streams I have checked out just because I saw a TikTok they posted. Use other avenues to promote your channel. I’m not saying go on Twitter and post you’re going live every time, I’m saying be smart and pretend this is your own business.

Now let’s finish off by being real. You can promote your stream all you want via social media, you can upload all the YouTube videos you want, but if you can keep the crowd when they come then you need to rethink your approach at your stream and see what you’re doing wrong.

Is your content boring? Are you unique or just doing the same thing as everyone else? If you’re doing the same thing that all the big streamers are doing, then why would someone watch you over them. I know these are easy questions for me to ask but seriously sit down and think these through and figure out how you can stand out.