As gambling on Twitch continues to be divisive, popular streamer Mizkif revealed that a sponsor offered him $35,000 hourly to gamble on stream and claimed that was just the tip of a potentially exploitative iceberg.
There are a lot of metas on Twitch and a lot of popular streamers who make a lot of money from those metas. Recently, one of the more divisive trends has been the surge of gambling on the platform.
To put it bluntly, gambling is considered a controversial activity on Twitch because it is a dangerous path for viewers to start engaging in. It’s illegal in many places for multiple reasons, as it’s easy to become addicted and quickly lose significant sums of money. This has been discussed by numerous streamers, including Trainwrecks — who advised his viewers not to partake, while he was playing slots.
Now, Mizkif has revealed the underbelly of the gambling phenomenon. He not only claimed that a gambling site offered him $35,000 hourly to use their platform on stream, but also that they had other tiers of partnership which would encourage him to give viewers money to start gambling themselves.
Even when he was averaging about 20,000 viewers (recently he’s hit the six-digit figures), Mizkif explains that this sponsor was willing to offer him $35K, which was “double” any other sponsorship opportunity he was given. As he mentions, streamers like xQc — who have massive fan bases — must be offered much higher payouts.
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Going further in-depth, the streamer exposes just how deep the opportunities go, touching on the moral ambiguities in the process.
“There’s different levels. And it’s almost like the higher you go, the lower your morals are.” As Mizkif elaborates, while expressing shock that other streamers engage in this practice, there are tiers to the partnership opportunities with gambling sponsors.
Past the wild $35K hourly rate, Mizkif explains that you can be given thousands of extra dollars for tweeting about the service, mentioning it on-stream, and for giving viewers real money to start gambling.
While gambling can obviously be perfectly fine in moderation, especially for extremely wealthy streamers, Mizkif is uncomfortable with the trend. In the midst of explaining how the business side of it works, he suggests that getting people started on gambling is a dangerous and immoral road.