Social media, individuals and organizations
Anyone in the gaming community will tell you whose logo this is.
This logo belongs to twitch.tv, one of the biggest livestreaming platforms on the web right now with 3.8 million unique broadcasters in February 2020 and 1.44 million concurrent viewers as of march 2020 (Iqbal, 2020). In my opinion it’s the most entertaining online platform available and many young gamers are dedicating their futures to being successful on Twitch with little regard for anything else, but why would you want to be successful on Twitch? According to Forbes (2020) the top streamer on Twitch that year, known as Ninja, earned a reported $17 million from his Twitch career. but how can that happen just from playing games online?
In early 2014, 3 years after its birth, Amazon purchased Twitch for just under $1bn (Johnson and Woodcock, 2017). This saw twitch receive an overhaul in operations and introduction of the official partnership programme, allowing streamers to earn a living off streaming on the site. This saw streamers earning money through advertisements played during their streams meaning the higher their viewer count was, the more money they would earn. On top of this, Twitch’s subscription system allows users to pay a fixed amount every month to a twitch partners stream and in return they will receive exclusive benefits in that streamers live chat, recognising them as a “subscriber”. For these reasons, videogame fanatics everywhere are trying their hand turning their passion into payday.
References:
Iqbal, A., 2020. Twitch Revenue And Usage Statistics (2020). [online] Business of Apps. Available at: <https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitch-statistics/> [Accessed 25 April 2020].
Johnson, M. and Woodcock, J., 2017. ‘It’s like the gold rush’: the lives and careers of professional video game streamers on Twitch.tv. Information, Communication & Society, [online] 22(3), pp.336-351. Available at: <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2017.1386229?casa_token=7WqCaXc3nSgAAAAA%3AFOI_xqNjYxhUs8sXz4ZrQns3SjY4d304Y2XrtV76M6kzHhHBaa-DxJhAr8BQygYeLNk1-fzuKSmVEQ> [Accessed 25 April 2020].
Perez, M., 2020. Top-Earning Video Gamers: The Ten Highest-Paid Players Pocketed More Than $120 Million In 2019. [online] Forbes. Available at: <https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattperez/2020/01/29/top-earning-video-gamers-the-ten-highest-paid-players-pocketed-more-than-120-million-in-2019/#d234be74880b> [Accessed 25 April 2020].
Twitch, 2019. Nice to meet you again, for the first time. [Blog] Twitch Blog, Available at: <https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2019/09/26/nice-to-meet-you-again-for-the-first-time/> [Accessed 25 April 2020]
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