Gaming Stream Revenue Estimator
Estimate monthly Twitch or YouTube stream revenue from ads, subscriptions, and donations using your own CPM, sub count, and ad-block rate.
How streaming revenue works
Nothing is priced in here. Every rate is a field you fill from your own dashboard, because a channel’s CPM (cost per thousand ad impressions) and its subscriber count are the two numbers that decide the answer, and both swing by a factor of five between channels of the same size.
1. Ad revenue
Impressions = Viewers × Hours × Ads per hour × (1 − ad-block rate) Ad revenue = Impressions ÷ 1,000 × CPM
Gaming CPM runs roughly $2 to $6 on both Twitch and YouTube, higher in the US, UK and Nordics, much lower elsewhere, and it spikes every December when advertisers spend the last of their budget. Ad blocking in gaming audiences is genuinely brutal, commonly 40 to 60%, so half your viewers may never generate an impression at all. Six ads an hour is a typical mid-roll cadence.
2. Subscriptions and memberships
Enter your actual subscriber count, not a percentage of viewers. The old rule of thumb that some fixed slice of your concurrent audience subscribes is where most streaming-income estimates go wrong: subscribers accumulate from your whole community over months, while concurrent viewers are a snapshot of one moment. A channel averaging 150 viewers commonly carries somewhere between 50 and 300 subs, and the number is on your dashboard, so there is no reason to guess it.
Twitch pays $2.50 on a standard $4.99 Tier 1. Our Twitch subscriber calculator breaks the tiers and splits down properly.
3. Bits, Super Chats and donations
Enter a monthly total. Bits are worth $0.01 each to you, YouTube takes about 30% of a Super Chat, and a direct PayPal or StreamElements donation is all yours. This line is the most volatile of the three: one generous regular can outweigh a month of ads.
Where the money actually is
At any serious size the answer is sponsorships, which this calculator does not attempt, because they are negotiated rather than derived. A single sponsored stream can pay more than a month of everything above. Treat the total here as the floor a channel earns passively, not its ceiling.
Important disclaimer
Actual earnings vary enormously with niche, engagement, consistency and negotiated deals. This is a ballpark from your own numbers, not a financial projection.
How we build and check this calculator
This calculator runs entirely in your browser, so the numbers you enter stay on your device. The math behind it is written by hand and tested against worked examples and standard references before the page goes live.
SuperGlobalCalculator is independently built and maintained. See how we build and verify our calculators.