Today, you can find streams for every taste from programming lessons, to make-up, cooking, and many hours of talking bloggers "for life." Streaming is a full-fledged industry with a multimillion audience in which advertisers invest a lot of money. And if promotional offers are available mainly to streamers with a large audience, even beginners can make money on donations. In this article I will tell you how streaming has become a multi-million dollar industry from simple entertainment, and top streamers to millionaires.

Was there a streaming in the USSR?

The history of the streams can be counted from the beginning of the 90s, when in Russia not only the Internet, but an ordinary computer was a real luxury. No, I'm not joking. See for yourself: for example, you are the first lucky owner of a console like Sega or Dendy in the classroom. All friends and classmates are after school to get to your home to enjoy the exciting spectacle of the duel Liu Kang and Sub Ziro, or watch the shooting of pixel ducks. So, here you are one of the first streamers, and your friends and classmates are the audience.

With the development of technology and the emergence of universal access to high-speed Internet, the time has come for entertainment games, where the quality of graphics and entertainment was approaching Hollywood action films. Video recordings of gaming sessions began to look more and more like movie scenes and flooded YouTube. This was the birth of the Letsplayer movement, from which modern streamers grew. The “father” of the Russian flysplay is Ilya Maddison .
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In 2012, it became possible to broadcast the video stream in real time. Stream became what we are accustomed to see them. Today, you can stream anything, but the widest audience is traditionally collected game broadcasts.

How to make money on streams

Each streamer pursues its own goals, whether it is communication with the audience or a desire to boast the skill of the game, but one thing unites them all - the desire to earn. And you can do this in several ways at once. For example, consider the most popular site - Twitch.

• Built-in advertising . On the stream with a large number of viewers Twitch "hangs up" advertising. Everything is simple here: the more your viewers see it, the more you earn.
  
• Paid access to stream . Subscribers will not see ads and will receive smiles in the chat, but a significant part of the audience will be lost.
  
• Direct advertising on stream . Upon reaching a certain threshold of the audience, the streamer becomes interesting for advertisers. You can tell about a product on the stream itself or put a link to it under the broadcast.
  
• Affiliate programs . It differs from the previous version by the absence of a direct agreement. You register and get the opportunity to attract people by referral links.
  
• Donati . Donation from the viewer to streamer. Today it is the most common way to monetize the stream. And there are no restrictions here: how much the viewer will like it - so much will it prick up.
  

Game streams bring the most donations. The audience of LoL, Dota2, Hearthstone, Overwatch, Counter-Strike is estimated in millions of users. Naturally, they like not only to play, but also to watch others play. For them, streaming your favorite game is an opportunity not only to spy on new tricks, but also to communicate with like-minded people.






Game streamers earn the biggest fees. Here are some publicly available statistics:

• Ninja - $ 5,100,000 per year. The lion's share ($ 4 million) falls on paid subscriptions.
  
• Shroud - $ 3,100,000 per year.
  
• TimTheTatman - $ 2,700,000 per year.
  

In Russia, the largest amount of one-time donat is equal to 200,000 rubles. Received such a "fat" donates several streamers: Yuri Khovansky , official_viking , AkTep , MJUTIX and Bullkin_TV . And the spectator turned out to be the most generous, who sent 315,000 rubles to streamers in a day. And everyone can earn on the streams, regardless of the type of activity or the past. For example, one of the most “collecting” streamers is Pug Uncle Dog , a former prisoner of a colony. The main thing is to find your viewer.

Interestingly, not only video, but also audio content is in demand on streams. For example, without ASMR, many can no longer present their evening.


Before the advent of special services for collecting donations, streamers collected donations directly to a card or electronic wallet. Needless to say, this was inconvenient at once for a number of reasons? First, it distracts both the streamer and the viewer. Secondly, there was no interaction with the streamer: he just once an hour came in and watched receipts in the Internet bank and thanked everyone. Of course, it could not continue for a long time and instruments began to appear, seeking to make the life of the tape drive more comfortable. Now in the West it is Streamlabs / Twitchalerts, Streamelements and Tipeeestream.

The emergence of such a service in Russia is also not long in coming. A few years ago, a self-taught programmer from Omsk named Sergei Trifonov watched foreign streams, and he liked how simple and convenient everything was: a couple of clicks — and money from a streamer. In foreign services there was no localization and support of our payment systems. Then Sergey decided to write his own service, adapted for Russia, and he became Donation Alerts - today the most popular tool in RuNet.



The service is free from all the drawbacks of a “manual” collection of donations and adds several convenient and useful features, while combining a friendly, user-friendly interface and ease of use:

• Save time and convenience . Stimer simply place a link to the donate under the video, and the viewer click. No need to go through a complex authorization system every time. The service supports all possible payment systems.
  
• Instant transfer of funds and ease of withdrawal . Receipts from all users are collected in one place and automatically displayed once a day.
  
• Visualization is the most important element of interactive on the stream. All donations are displayed on the stream, causing a violent reaction leading. Also on the stream, you can add voting, viewing media and displaying paid subscribers.
  

To register with Donation Alerts, just log in with your account on social networks. The service is not an electronic wallet and does not store money for more than a day, therefore every night all funds are automatically withdrawn and sent to the user through the payment system chosen by him.

During the broadcast, you can collect donations for a specific purpose and record the final amount (for example, buying a new instrument or device, upgrading a computer - something your soul deigns). The progress indicator of the required amount will be visible to all participants. You can set several goals at once, then the viewer will decide for himself what to donate. In the statistics control panel, you can analyze the activity of the audience at one time or another stream and customize the operation of the widgets. This will help make your stream even more efficient, as well as assess and eliminate shortcomings.

Instead of conclusion

From year to year the streaming segment grows, and with it the interest of the audience grows. And if several years ago most of the streamers were gaming, now most of them began to combine game streams with conversational or IRL. This allows viewers to dive deeper into the life of their beloved host and to feel a certain involvement. In addition, world practice suggests that streaming moves towards maximum interactivity, and therefore the need to create more and more tools for streamers remains unchanged.