As the creator economy has matured, more people have become interested in tracking how content performs for the people who make it. Stats like follower numbers and view counts are publicly available for anyone to see, and sites like Streams Charts, MrBeast‘s ViewStats, and Tubefilter‘s own Gospel Stats take a deeper look by plugging into the backend of YouTube and Twitch.
But one stat that’s still difficult to predict with accuracy is creator revenue. Sure, we can make our best guesstimate based on industry knowledge of things like YouTube’s average CPM, but there are dozens upon dozens of factors that go into each creator’s individual earnings. Creators can have wildly different CPMs on the same platform. Then there’s brand deals. Merch sales. What if they licensed their content library? What about Super Chats on YouTube, or donations on Twitch?
What we’re saying is it’s impossible to tell exactly how much a creator is making without that creator or a member of their team personally confirming–and getting those confirmations is rare. So, there’s simply no 100% bulletproof way to nail it down for a large number of creators, and thus no way to establish a reliable, industry-wide scale of creator earnings.
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However, sometimes creators do reveal how much they make. Most of the time, those reveals are on purpose.
But sometimes they’re not.
On April 24, Jynxzi–who has 7.2 million followers and is one of Twitch’s top creators–was chatting with viewers when he stood to take a break and accidentally switched to his Twitch analytics tab, which showed that he’s made a whopping $452,448 on the platform in the last 30 days.
It also showed that he currently has more than 80,000 active channel subscriptions and has streamed 236 hours over the past month, with an average of 24,513 concurrent viewers.
This is all interesting data, but Jynxzi didn’t mean to reveal it. After a gasp and a quick “Oh my god,” he switched the tab back, then sort of froze for a moment and asked, “What just happened?”
Unfortunately for him, because he was live, this moment is now preserved on the internet forever.
There is an upside here, though. While he may not have wanted his earnings to be public knowledge, we would argue this is a positive thing for our industry.
Jynxzi is, according to Twitch Tracker, the 10th top-performing streamer on all of Twitch. Over the past five years, we’ve seen more and more outside people and companies begin to view content creation as the powerhouse it is; seeing just how much Jynxzi makes from his position can only add to this mainstream legitimacy.
On top of that, his monthly revenue figure is a valuable insight for other creators, especially newbies. There aren’t many direct-from-creator resources about the financials people can expect when they get into making content. Now, obviously not a lot of people are going to achieve Jynxzi numbers, but knowing what a high-level creator makes can still help up-and-comers contextualize the cash that hits their own bank accounts.
Again, we get why creators–especially top creators–choose not to reveal their earnings. It’s a privacy thing, and in some cases, a safety thing. But when numbers do come out, there can be industry-wide positives.
