The serious cyber attack suffered by Twitch earlier this week continues to generate debate and controversy. The company itself, the streaming platform owned by Amazon, has confirmed everything on its official channels, attributing the blame to some changes made to the configuration of the servers, which have left the field free to the hacker or hackers. According to an anonymous source from ShackNews, they could instead come directly from an employee, since they are confidential data and protected by complex security protocols.
Follow the money
However, it is not the only issues of privacy and security, which are already delicate in themselves, that take center stage: it is in fact the revenues of the content creators who populate the platform every day to monopolize the conversation on the matter, collected in a ranking (quickly gone offline) including the total amount collected by individual users in the period from August 2019 to October 2021. Figures that are actually incomplete, primarily because they are gross and do not take into account taxes and ancillary costs, thus leaving your eyes rolling without thinking too much about how much remains in the pocket of each creator, but also because they only include what is received directly by Twitch in the form of subscriptions, percentage of advertising and bits.
The former are comparable to a subscription, a monthly amount that the viewer or fan of a content creator pays in exchange for benefits of various kinds: from the possibility of recovering direct past to being able to access groups and private chats in which to enter directly into contact with your favorite, passing through the elimination of advertising during broadcasts. Of that amount (starting at $ 5, € 3.99), half remains at Twitch, the other is paid to the streamer. Same fate for the revenues of the commercials broadcast during the live broadcast: the most famous creators, upon agreement with the company, are entitled to up to 70% and 80% of advertising revenues, as stated by Alex Curry, marketing expert and influencer, to Wired US. THE bits instead they are an internal currency that can be donated during live broadcasts, most of the time receiving a greeting or thanks in real time in exchange for the support offered.
On the other hand, the proceeds related to sponsorships, with agreements signed outside Twitch by individual creators, or real donations through external channels (such as PayPal), which make it even more difficult to get an idea of the actual earnings, are excluded from the count.
Italians
There was no shortage of reactions to the dissemination of these data: from the indignant comments of users, amazed by such high figures (such as the 9,626,712.16 dollars of Critical Role, a channel specialized in role-playing games, at the top of the boundless list), to creators themselves, who recalled that it is still a work, however new and very different from the more classic and well-known ones. As did Dario Moccia, one of the most followed and appreciated streamers in Italy (295,717 followers), who introduced his live commenting on what happened as follows: “I don’t say these things to justify myself, as long as I do a job that generates income on which I I pay taxes, I pay INPS etc. “. Recalling, however, that the number of subscriptions has always been in the public domain, and that it was possible to obtain similar information with a simple mathematical calculation.
He is not the only Italian on the list: among the top 100, there are only two Italian streamers, Cristiano Spadaccini, aka ZanoXVII (1.3 million followers), and Gianmarco Tocco, known as Tumblurr (725.096 followers). Below are personalities such as Giorgio “Pow3r” Calandrelli (1.7 million followers), professional player and creator, ilMasseo (1.4 million followers), Xiuder_ (691.153), MatteoHS (789.840), gskianto (626.024), velox (466.043), panetty (464.646), The RealMarzaa (894.171), Homyatol (762.852), JustGaBBo (663.878), LyonWGFLive (641.961), MikeShowSha (592.605) and Rekinss (588.228).
Manga, old videos and trading cards: welcome to the universe of Dario Moccia
by Gianmaria Tammaro
The Americans
In America, where the numbers (in terms of followers and revenues) are much higher, there are also those who joked about it, asking to be called as the occupied number in the aforementioned ranking. An example is Ludwig “ludwig” Ahgren, 3 million followers and as many dollars in revenue received by Twitch in the last two years, who has inserted a “Number 6”, a reference to his position, in the titles of recent live shows. In one of these, however, he addressed the issue directly, even calculating his actual revenues in real time, adding and also revealing how much he earns from donations and sponsorships. He thus violated not only the Twitch policy that prevents creators from revealing what they receive from the platform (now useless, in light of the leak), but also possible agreements signed with other companies, preferring however a crystalline and over the top communication, as per its tradition. In fact, it is not the first time for the American content creator: following the controversy, he revealed the revenues of his marathon, an uninterrupted live that began on March 14, 2021 and ended on April 13, from which he collected 1.4 million dollars, explaining however, as between taxes, management costs (such as salaries for moderators who keep order in the chat) and ancillary costs, he has “only” 202,000 dollars left in his pocket.
Cause and effect
However, the developers of the video games on which many content creators build entire careers have also been fueled by the flame of the controversy. Without going to the extremes of those who argue that streamers should pay some sort of license to be able to play and show content, many find the discrepancy between the proceeds of the creators and developers of those same games shown in the direct unjust. The debate is triggered by Cliff Bleszinski, lead designer of the first three chapters of the famous saga Gears of War, but already last year the question was raised by a comment by Alex Hutchinson, creative director who worked for Ubisoft and Stadia (Google’s gaming platform): are video games guaranteeing the success of streamers or are streamers selling more video games?
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