Monetizing your stream is an excellent way to earn an income from your Twitch account. However, it’s not easy to become a Partner, which gives you the best built-in tools for making money off your content.
Luckily, you can still monetize your channel through a variety of methods.
Go for Affiliate
Unlike YouTube, Twitch has a two-tier approach to the way it allows streamers to monetize their channels. The first layer is Affiliate and it’s pretty easy to achieve if you stream fairly regularly. To be eligible, you need to hit the following goals:
- Gain at least 50 followers
- Stream for at least 500 total minutes in the last 30 days
- Stream on at least 7 unique days in the last 30 days
- Have an average of 3 concurrent viewers in the last 30 days
Getting the minutes, stream days, and concurrent viewers are pretty straightforward. Make sure you maintain a regular schedule and try to be within a category that isn’t saturated but has a regular sizeable viewer base. An example game for this is Cuphead.
The 50 followers is a bit stickier but following some basic principles will help encourage people to push that Follow button.
Once you’re an Affiliate streamer on Twitch, you can run ads, have emojis, and, most importantly, set up subscriptions.
Set up merch
Most people prefer to spend their hard-earned money on tangible objects so you should consider merchandising as an option. You don’t need to be a Partner or Affiliate to have merch on your channel. There are third-party sites like the ones below where you can create your own line:
- Streamlabs
- Spreadshirt
- Teespring
- Design by Humans
The easiest way to connect your Twitch channel to your mech store is by setting up a panel with a link. Some of the above options use their own Twitch extensions. You can also advertise your merch using a Twitch chatbot.
Set up donations
The low-hanging fruit of monetization options that’s open to all streamers regardless of partnership status is a donation link. All you need to do is pick a donation service, such as Streamlabs and PayPal, and link to it through your channel panels. Easy peasy.
The main upside of donations is that your viewers can choose how much they want to donate to you. There is no extra fee they need to pay on their end so it’s literally like they’re tipping you. The best part is that you can dress this up any way you prefer. One popular way streamers encourage viewers to donate is by saying “buy me a coffee” or “pay for my next beer”, all in the name of supporting your channel.
Use external subscriptions
If you aren’t an Affiliate or Partner, you can’t have access to subscriptions on Twitch. But that doesn’t stop you from using a third-party platform to get your viewers to support you every month.
The most popular service is Patreon and it’s pretty amazing. You can set up multiple support tiers, each with its own set of rewards. Most content creators set their cheapest tier to be about $1 per month and reward subscribers with a shoutout. Higher tiers can include any other rewards you can come up with, such as special access to your Discord server, stuff you have created, blooper reels, and more.
Get a sponsor
This is the holy grail of content creator monetization. Getting yourself a sponsor on your channel will earn you more money than any of the other methods listed in this post. However, this is also the hardest one to acquire.
Sponsors need a good reason for giving you money to advertise and promote their stuff and services. That reason is a sizeable viewership that also fits their demographic. In a lot of cases, that level of viewership is enough to make you a Partner. However, there are Twitch streamers who have reached the criteria for Partner status but have never received the invite. So, if you’re one of these content creators, you’ll likely have the numbers you need to get a sponsor.
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