In the past week, some of our users noticed that there were streamers with unusually huge income from Bits. They have way less viewers, but their estimated income from Bits is much bigger than that of Twitch megastars such as KaiCenat, ibai, xQc, and many others. So we at Streams Charts decided to take a deeper look into this subject.
What are Twitch Bits
Bits, along with donations and subscriptions, are one of the ways Twitch viewers can support their favorite streamers. With Bits, viewers can use animated emoticons, get special badges, vote in polls, and get access to many other exclusive tools. Viewers can send a minimum of 100 Bits, which cost $1,77 (or the equivalent in another currency). The maximum amount of Bits a user can buy in a single transaction is 25K Bits, which costs $385 at the time of writing. It's also worth noting that Twitch Bits have some time-limited offers, discounts for users that buy a big number of Bits, and a discount on the first purchase.
The sums you will see mentioned in the text are coming from the official Twitch formula to calculate the income from Bits.
We collected all the stats of streamers that had earned over $5K from 17th December 2022 - 17th January 2023, but had only 25 or fewer chatters who donated Bits. These values were chosen since they demonstrate a very high-income amount, combined with a low number of chatters, something that should be very rare or almost nonexistent.
After collecting all the stats, we noticed over a dozen streamers who fitted the description. We continued to investigate them, to see what they had in common. We checked how many users were donating to them, how many Bits on average were these users donating, who else they were watching, and many other things.
What are the suspicious cases of earnings from Twitch Bits?
The thirteen streamers we investigated made some huge amounts of money from Bits. We have streamers such as hebele and Kosif making $15,000 despite not one of them having even close to 1K Average Viewers. Others like RonniePEEK or lawstream made $14,000 from Bits, and their viewership is equally low. Despite that, all of them made more than most of the top content creators of the platform, which is enough to raise the alarm bell.
All of the thirteen streamers had an insane average of Bits per message. Hebele is an example of that, with the creator having an astonishing 126K Bits per cheer message. If we compare it to a streamer with “normal” stats, like Shylily, who had 681 Bits per cheer message, we can see there is a huge disparity in the numbers, despite Shylily being much more popular.
We also discover that, of the thirteen creators, ten of them received the majority of their income from Bits while their broadcast was off. This is also very strange, since usually viewers donate when the creators are live, to interact with them. Doing so while they aren't live, is very counterintuitive.
Another thing we noticed was that the majority of the streamers in the list had less than three users donating 90% of all the estimated Bits. If we take a look at the examples provided above, we can see that creators usually have multiple users donating to them, which makes this even more strange.
All of this is very unusual and raises some doubts. For example, in the case of Turkish streamer Kosif, one chatter donated 99.9% of his total income from Bits. He supported the streamer with $15.3K. What is more surprising, is that this viewer made all his donations while Kosif was offline, something that is far from normal.
Among the creators in the list, Turkish streamer hebele is the one that stands out the most, since according to our estimate, he did an impressive $15.1K from Bits, despite his broadcast having only 44 AV. Hebele had an impressive average of 126.5K Bits per message, while only having 2 chatters. This means each user donated an astonishing 759K Bits, the equivalent of $7.5K, which is impressive, to say the least. Furthermore, all the Bits were donated when hebele wasn't streaming.
The two users, who donated the Bits to hebele, didn't donate or watch any other streamer. They also only watched hebele broadcasts for around 2 minutes in 30 days. Normally, users on Twitch watch multiple streamers, even if they only donate to a small percentage of the creators they watch. It's also very unusual to see users who donate such a big amount of money to a creator, but don’t watch any of his content, showing a complete lack of interest in his broadcasts.
Headshot_kw is also one of the streamers on the list, but as opposed to the majority of the creators, he received all of his Bits donations while live. The number of users that donated to him is also higher, with 19 chatters sending a total of 179 Bits messages, which generated a $9.2K income. Headshot_kw average Bits per message was 5K Bits, which is the second-lowest average in the list. However, similar to hebele, 90% of Headshot_kw viewers did not watch his broadcasts for a whole month, and once again, three users make up the majority of the Bits donated to a creator.
Another creator that catches the eye is RonniePEEK. He streams mostly Knight Online and PUBG: Battlegrounds. Similar to the streamers mentioned previously, three users donated the majority of the Bits, and did it while he was offline. What's more surprising, is that RonniePEEK only received 16 Bits messages, but managed to make a substantial amount of $12.6K from Bits. Every chatter donated him an average of 79K Bits per message, the second highest on the list, only behind hebele.
In total, the thirteen streamers had a combined 59 donators, and only 9 of them donated to more than one creator. This means that the majority of the users that donated did so almost exclusively to these streamers. Despite that, they still didn’t watch their broadcasts, since the donations were mostly made when the creators were offline.
One thing all of the creators mentioned have in common, is that the users who donated to them have very suspicious usernames. Most of them have the names of typical bot accounts, using random numbers and letters in their username. Combined with the fact they pretty much don’t watch anyone on Twitch, donate while the creators are offline, and most of them use the default avatar picture, it’s safe to say they are not your typical Twitch users.
How much do streamers usually make from Bits?
To see how "weird" some streamers' earnings are, let's take a look at how much money popular platform creators with thousands of followers are making with Twitch Bits. Let’s take a look at Jynxzi, a North American streamer with 4-5K Average Viewers. During the period of 17th December 2022 - 17th January 2023, the creator had 3K cheer messages that were sent by 1.3K users. Every cheer message had an average of 125 Bits. He made $4K from Bits during that period, which is an average amount.
Twitch star LVNDMARK, arguably the biggest Escape from Tarkov creator on the platform, has a great number of concurrent viewers, with 35K tuning into his broadcast daily. In the same period, he had 2K cheer messages, and 1K users donating Bits to him. Every cheer message had an average amount of 705 Bits. LVNDMARK made $13K from Bits, and this value is what many of the top content creators in the platform usually make in a month.
When we compare some of these streamers with the top content creators on Twitch, we see exactly why this topic caught the attention of so many people. If we compare hebele with xQc, one of the faces of Twitch, we can see that the Turkish streamer has a substantially higher income from Bits, despite not even coming close to the audience the Canadian streamer is able to reach.
Hebele has only 44 AV, while xQc has an impressive 56K viewers tuning into his streams regularly. However, despite being one of the big names of Twitch, and having fans all around the globe, xQc did only an estimated $4.6K from Bits, while hebele did an amazing $15K.
RonniePEEK is another example of this. He has the biggest average viewership of the thirteen creators on the list, with 933 fans watching his broadcasts daily. When comparing him with the Spanish megastar ibai, most of us would expect ibai to not only have a much higher number of AV, but also have a substantially higher income from Bits. While ibai does indeed have a higher number of concurrent viewers, with 75K, he made only $4K from Bits, which is a small amount compared to the $12K RonniePEEK did in the same period.
What's more impressive, is that these streamers have only a few users donating, while the top creators have hundreds of viewers donating Bits. But the majority of the top Twitch streamers, don’t make anywhere near as much from Bits, even though they have a bigger average viewership, a more active chat, and more users donating.
Conclusion
We reached out to the thirteen streamers on this list for a comment, but unfortunately, most of them didn't reply, with one of them even blocking us from being able to contact them again. Kosif replied to our message, and tried to set a meeting. This was something that we didn't deem necessary, since we only wanted a comment on the topic. In the end, he also didn't give us any comment on the subject.
One of the Turkish streamers we reached out to, and that is not mentioned in the article, provided us with a comment. The creator says that he has done nothing illegal, and that the Bits for android phones were at a big discount during that period of time, which is why he made an unusually high amount from it.
As we can see from all the stats provided in the article, the income these creators have is much higher than normal, which raises a lot of questions, especially when it comes to the circumstance in which the donations were made. Having a small community, and making these huge amounts of money from Bits donations, that even surpass top creators in the platform by a lot, is certainly out of the ordinary.
Our small investigation was conducted on a specific time period, 30 days, and doesn't cover longer time periods, so there could be other strange cases to look at. As we mentioned at the beginning of the article, we are just presenting the stats, and trying to shed some light on this very complex topic.
What is worth noting is that it’s not the first time users find some suspicious activity in Bits donations. In 2021, more than 300 Turkish Valorant streamers were involved in a money laundering scandal. The streamers were making suspicious high amounts of money, with the majority coming from Bits donations. They received donations through Twitch from stolen credit cards, and they would then send 50-70% of their revenue to the scammers. As a result, many players were released by their organizations, Riot issued numerous penalties, and at least 40 people were arrested.
