Being paid to do what we love to do is surely everyone’s wish! And that is certainly true in the sports world, whether your sport is soccer, tennis, golf or video gaming!
While there are multiple examples of sportsmen and women making a living from traditional sports, there is a question about whether this will be possible for large numbers of eSports and gaming enthusiasts.
This article will explore some of the current ways for streamers to earn an income from their sport and will introduce exciting options being offered by the Play2Live platform. Play2Live is a blockchain-based streaming platform for gamers and eSports fans. It is a trailblazer in merging blockchain technology and streaming services — and more than doubles the number of revenue options for streamers.
Professionalism in traditional sports
Every little boy playing soccer wants to be the next Messi or Ronaldo; athletes have their eyes on Usain Bolt; tennis players watch Nadal and Federer. These players are not just at the top of the heap for skills and earnings — they also seem to have retained their passion for the sport.
However, professional sports have become a commercial enterprise and the top earners often make more from sponsorships and appearance money than from playing the game. Roger Federer is a good example. He earned $64 million in 2017, but only $6 million of this was in prize money for tennis.
Teams are also very profitable. The Dallas Cowboys are the most valuable professional sports team, with a market value of more than $4 billion. They haven’t won the NFL championships for more than 20 years, but they own their stadium and have sold naming rights to AT & T. Manchester United, worth $3,69 billion, generates commercial income from sponsorships — the most recent being a $1 billion deal with Adidas. The New York Knicks and the Los Angeles Lakers were the most valuable basketball teams in 2017, mainly due to deals for media rights.
The important lesson from all of this is that both individuals and teams must move beyond just playing the game if they want to earn the most lucrative incomes.
Professionalism in eSports and gaming
The picture for eSports and gaming is similar to traditional sports, albeit that the amounts may be lower.
A top team such as Team Liquid, which won the 2017 Dota2 International, and also participates very successfully in CS:GO, League of Legends, Heroes of the Storm and Halo, has earned total prize money of more than $18 million. Notable players in the team, such as Kuro Takhasomi (KuroKy) and Ivan Ivanov (MinD_ContRoL), have earned nearly $3 million each.
However, according to Steve Arhancet, CEO and co-owner of Team Liquid, tournament winnings are a small part of the total income earned. eSports and gaming have become spectator sports, with broadcasts of tournaments being watched by more people than watch the NBA or NHL finals. This brings in advertisers and marketers. Team Liquid has revenue from different leagues, with a share in media rights and TV sponsorships. Other income is from partnerships with companies advertising on jerseys, social media, videos and graphics of the team — much of it distributed on streaming platforms such as Twitch. Added to this is income from in-game items and physical merchandise like caps and t-shirts.
Top individual streamers like Ninja are said to earn $500,000 per month. Ninja is currently the streamer partner on Twitch with the highest number of followers (nearly 8 million) and with nearly 200 million channel views. This is attributed to his superior skill at the game fortnite plus his ability to entertain watchers. His income really comes from the influence and pull he has because of this huge number of followers. Revenue comes from subscriptions from Twitch followers, affiliate percentages from Amazon for products profiled on his streaming site, advertising to his 5 million subscribers on YouTube and his million followers on Instagram.
Starting out as a professional
In both traditional and eSports, the greater majority of players and teams don’t earn anything like the amounts given above.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics gives the median pay for 2017 professional sports competitors as $51,370 per year, which is about $4,300 per month. This despite the entry qualifications being “superior talent, knowledge of the game and years of practice and experience at lower levels”. The statistics also describe a work environment where competitors work irregular hours, often over weekends and evenings, generally more than 40 hours per week during the sports season, and with a projected growth over the next 10 years of only 7%.
This picture is probably the more realistic one for the vast majority of aspirant or newly professional players.
There is a similar picture for streamers, where the average income seems to be in the region of $2,000 to $5,000 per month. Those who are successful work very hard — generally at least 60 hours per week. They need to be consistent over a long period to build up their followers and develop an on-camera personality. In the end, it is the fans who will decide whether the streamer is good enough to use gaming as a career path.
How do streamers earn an income from playing video games?
Where does the money come from for streamers? And is it possible to increase it sufficiently for streamers to really make a living from playing video games?
The best way to look at this may be to look at how streamers earn an income on Twitch.
The streaming platform Twitch is by far the biggest social video service and community for gamers, with more than 100 million monthly unique viewers and 15 million daily active users (DAU). It currently has 220,000 streamers registered as “affiliates” and 25,000 streamers registered as “partners”. Users spend an average of 106 minutes per day on Twitch. Nearly half of all users spend more than 20 hours per week watching videos on the site.
A look at the streamer stats shows how many followers there are. At number one spot is Ninja, approaching 8 million followers. Even “Sp00nerism” who is in spot 500, has nearly 270,000 followers. However, Twitch does not reward “followers” — it is looking for active “viewers”. So, “Riotgames” who is at number 5 with 2,9 million followers, will be well rewarded because he has over 994 million channel views, compared to Ninja’s 194 million.
With numbers like that it is no wonder that streamers, advertisers and marketers are very interested.
There are various ways for streamers to make money:
- Subscriptions: Viewers can support a streamer by subscribing about $5 per month. This gives the viewer certain benefits like access to badges and emotes. An established streamer will earn $3 of the $5 per subscriber. The streamer will also be allocated slots to load animated icons (emoticons or emotes), many of them customized and used as part of building a community.
- Advertising: Twitch produces an “effective cost per 1000 impressions” (eCPM) rate for each streamer, depending on their viewership, and taking into account the likelihood of adblocking. Streamers can expect an eCPM of $0.70 rising to about $2,50 per 1000 views. As an example, a streamer with 2,000 concurrent viewers, working a 40-hour week, with 3 advertisements per hour would earn $240 per week. Someone with 20,000 viewers and an eCPM of $2 would earn $4,800 per week.
- Donations / Cheering with Bits: Streamers have a “donate” button on their sites, where viewers can make donations via PayPal to support them. Most streamers say that they earn more from donations than from subscriptions, although it is less regular.
Twitch has commercialized this option through its “Cheering with Bits” programme. A Bit is a Twitch currency — $1,40 buys 100 Bits. A cheer is an emoticon — starting with 1 Bit for a grey bouncing triangle, 100 Bits for a dancing purple diamond and up to 10 000 Bits for a fractured red star — all for viewers to show appreciation for the streamer. 70% of the revenue from these Bits is paid to the streamer and Twitch keeps 30%. This means just less than a cent per Bit to the streamer or just less than a dollar for every 10,000 Bits.
- Game sales: Streamers can promote the games they are playing and share in revenue if viewers buy them.
- Amazon affiliate programme — Amazon pays between 4% and 8.5% for anything purchased within 24 hours of it being promoted on the streamer channel.
- Well established streamers may also receive sponsorships. This can be payments for playing a game or using certain gear and can grow significantly.
All of this looks very promising.
Drawbacks to the current streaming platforms
There are some significant caveats. The most important is that these revenue streams are not open to all streamers.
Casual streamers cannot earn anything.
Affiliates can have some subscription revenue but cannot participate in advertising revenues. Nor do they have the customized extras like emotes or customized cheermotes.
To qualify as an Affiliate, a streamer must maintain all four of the requirements:
- Stream for 8 hours in the last 30 days
- Stream on 7 days in the last 30 days
- Reach an average of 3 viewers per stream
- Have an audience of at least 50 followers
To be a Partner on Twitch, a streamer must:
- Stream at least 3 times per week
- Have average concurrent viewership of at least 500
This may sound easy, but one report showed that in a random sample of over 900 League of Nations broadcasts, only 34 pulled in over 500 concurrent viewers. Only half of these had more than 1,000 — which is the starting level to benefit from advertising revenue. Advice from a current streamer was to build up a following on YouTube of over 15,000 views and 100,000 subscribers before the Twitch Partner programme would become profitable.
In addition, Partners must wait 45 days for payment and Affiliates 60 days (and they must also pay their own transaction fees).
In general, it seems that it is likely to be difficult for average streamers to make a living from Twitch alone. Many streamers will use their numbers and influence to run videos of their games on YouTube and Instagram to bring in the advertising revenue from these channels too, although adblocking is making this increasingly difficult. They may also set up separate channels for subscriptions and donations, using PayPal or Patreon. Some will develop instructional videos for different games or provide coaching to other streamers. Many will take on other part-time jobs.
Play2Live seems to offer a significant improvement on these conditions.
Play2Live provides a generous alternative for streamers
Play2Live is a very different platform from the current top platforms like Twitch and YouTube.
This is partly because it is blockchain-based and therefore offers monetization options not possible on traditional sites. It is also different because of the way it has been conceptualized as a single ecosystem offering a full suite of services.
The primary participants are the viewer, the streamer and the eSports tournament organizer. However, Play2Live also offers high levels of interoperability, encouraging other partners, products and users to join its ecosystem. This includes providers of games, skins and in-game items, app developers, major tournament organizers, ticketing systems and bookmakers. Everybody can be part of the peer-to-peer interaction and everybody — even the viewer — can earn money.
No other platform offers the total gamification option, the crowdfunding and escrow services for streamers and organizers, the P2P CDN option or the wide variety of interactivity options for streamers and viewers that are available on Play2Live.
Because of the diversity, all participants are incentivized to stay on the platform rather than moving to other sites.
The platform will have 25 modules, with revenue options from 15 of them. Blockchain technology ensures transparency and certainty in payment to all parties.
A single currency, the Play2Live LUC, will be the only means of payment on the platform, regardless of whether this is for content creation for streamers, payment to a viewer for winning a bet, purchasing an in-game item or participating in a duel with another viewer. In addition, up to 10% of the LUC generated as revenue for Play2Live will be distributed as rewards to users who are most active on the platform.
LUC will be a huge drawcard to the site. Unlike Twitch’s Bit, the LUC has both utility and intrinsic value. Not only will it be used for all the services, but it can also be traded for other cryptocurrencies or for fiat currencies, either on the Play2Live exchange gateway or on public exchanges.
Streamers will have 11 revenue options — compared to 5 on current streaming platforms.
The Play2Live ecosystem has been set up to create the most favorable conditions for streamers. This includes monetization as shown in the table and also includes the ability for streamers to alter aspects of the economy to suit themselves and their viewers better — eg choosing subscription fees rates or allocating a percentage of advertising revenue to viewers.
They will also be paid from their very first streaming, without any limitations. Streamers are B2B partners, incentivized to attract new viewers.
Viewers are also incentivized. Not only are they able to interact directly with streamers and each other, but also, they have 5 revenue streams. They are paid for watching advertisements, for being part of consensus voting, for winnings from the in-built betting and gambling systems and for sharing computer resources via a P2P CDN service.
There is a unique approach to dealing with the problem of adblocking: advertising is disabled by default. Viewers can support the streamer by choosing to watch the advertising and are then rewarded with LUC for watching. Streamers then earn advertising revenue typically associated with commercials, banners and branding. The platform also allows for comprehensive marketing campaigns, and blockchain provides a transparent performance tracking system.
A really interesting source of revenue is the last on the list above: rewards for activity within the platform. One of these is that viewers can vote with tokens for the format they want for a tournament. Revenue is shared with tournament organizers and streamers who develop special content according to the criteria set by viewers.
All of these benefits to participants are likely to drive the growth of the platform and the value of the LUC token.
Why consider Play2Live?
Play2Live will need a huge marketing effort to attract the first groups of popular streamers, tournament organizers, bookmakers and others to its platform, as it does not have the brand recognition or customer base of YouTube, Amazon or Twitch. However, because it has designed such attractive and generous monetization options, once it gets started the “network effect” is likely to quickly grow the numbers.
A significant portion of the proceeds from the ICO has been allocated to negotiating exclusive broadcasting rights with popular streamers and with obtaining the rights to broadcast major eSports tournaments. Funds have also been allocated to supporting the first streamers and tournament organizers to the platform.
Details of these activities will be publicized when the beta version is launched in July 2018.
Streamers who are hoping to make a living from playing video games might be well-advised to consider the Play2Live option. If the 5-revenue-stream model available from other sites is said to provide the potential for earning a living, then those 5 options plus 6 more on the Play2live platform must surely be worth investigating!
Stay tuned!
