How Livestreaming Is Making Millennials A Lot Of Money

In this day and age of the Internet, it isn’t really surprising to know that most people are earning their keep without needing to leave home. Majority of millennials (or those born between 1982 and 2004) understand that if you want to get something done, you only need to go online to make things happen. This also applies to having a job. In fact, gone are those days when the brick and mortar office seemed to be the only way to generate funds to live. If you know how to navigate the Web and have a social media presence, you can enjoy passive income through means that you actually love. One of these is livestreaming.

What Is Livestreaming?

Live broadcasting is fast becoming a viable digital career.

Live broadcasting, like going on Instagram or having a YouTube presence, is fast becoming a viable digital career. According to Yuki He, chief executive of Live.me, some livestreamers stand to earn as much as $20,000 every week (sometimes even more) from virtual gifts. All one needs is a camera and an Internet connection where the content will be broadcast and viewed by an infinite number of people in real-time. These can be seen via different channels, such as the Web, Android, iOS and Apple TV.

One YouTuber, Emma Jacobs (not her real name), recently partnered with livestreaming service YouNow to showcase herself with her plethora of exotic animals. All she did was talk about each of them as if she were at show-and-tell. In the half-hour that she did so, Jacobs reportedly earned $99.

“I had no idea people could make money by doing this. I talked about whether (animals) make good pets, how people can get over their fear of holding a tarantula, or how to tame their pet,” said Jacobs.

Josh Day, an estate agent, chats to his almost 37,000 livestream fans for a few minutes or hours each day talking about everything under the sun. Sometimes, he’s just playing games live. This is how he entertains his viewers. Surprisingly, people are happy enough with what they see that they send him virtual gifts that he can later redeem for cash. It all began when a stranger gifted him with a virtual castle worth $200 on his second livestreaming session.

“I was just in my bedroom talking day-to-day stuff and having a prat around. I screamed and ran to tell my mum. From there, it just went from great to amazing,” said Day. On some occasions, people send him gifts worth $1,400. Now, his earnings reportedly average at some $2,400 per month.

The New Millennial Way Of Life

It seems that privacy is no longer a sacred thing among millennials. They spend most of their waking hours either following people online or broadcasting even the minutest details of their daily lives on social networks. Beyond the self-elevating posts, the Internet is also now a major means of making a living. In fact, Live.me’s He adds that many have even left their office jobs to put more effort into online media, specifically broadcasting and livestreaming, on a full-time scale.

Making Money

Livestreamers with a considerable following are more likely to get offers for ad placements on their pages.

But how does one really earn off livestreaming? Advertising is one. Livestreamers with a considerable following are more likely to get offers for ad placements on their pages. The likes of Periscope and Facebook Live now even allow mid-roll and pre-roll ads on people’s livestreams — and broadcasters get paid for the airtime. You’ll need to have at least 300 viewers on FB Live, for example, to get the attention of potential advertisers. That’s already a quite a huge number.

Another way to make money is via fan donations. This means that viewers pay a small fee to get their messages pinned to the top for a predetermined amount of time. In the case of the platform Twitch, viewers pay for affiliated streamers to gather Bits, which stand out from the rest of the chat exchanges during the broadcast. The streamer gets a percentage of earnings from the Bits.

Livestreamers can also earn via subscriptions. Viewers make either one-time or monthly subscriptions to support their favorite broadcaster, so the latter can have the budget to keep going and make more quality content in the future. This system allows the streamer to build a core audience for income without alienating newcomers.

The Pressure To Keep Up

It’s not all the time that you will have solid content to work with to keep viewers interested. You have to keep people coming back.

Of course, it’s not all the time that you will have solid content to work with to keep viewers interested. In short, your value as a live streamer is only as good as the content you bring to the screen. Unless you’re a super popular celebrity that seeing you perform the most mundane tasks will still generate financial support from viewers. But, that’s an entirely different story.

“People think it’s glam that you can be making money from home, but you have to work hard,” notes Jacobs. “You can’t just go live and be a multimillionaire. You have to keep people coming back to you.”

Are you a fan of livestreamers? Is there anybody we should be watching out for and following online? Do you know of other ways millennials are making money off the Internet? Share them with us in the comments below!