For the past week and a half, Twitch star Ludwig Ahgren has been on the clock. Whether asleep, awake, or drowsily somewhere between, Ahgren has kept his stream running to fulfill the terms of a "subathon" where every subscription adds ten seconds to a timer. So far, he's pulled in nearly $500,000. He says, however, that when it's all said and done, he'll see only a fraction of that money.
When Ahgren began his subathon, he was already a very successful streamer with over 1.5 million followers. He faced criticism, then, for seemingly wanting to line his already-packed pockets with even more cash by employing a strategy that's more common among smaller streamers. Since then, he's walked a contradictory line, giving his marathon stream an event feel in an obvious attempt to garner attention (and subscriptions). But he's also discouraged viewers from doing things like spending their stimulus checks on him—and even going so far as to outright ban people who gift too many subscriptions in his chat.
Yesterday, he broke down the money element of all this. During his stream, Ahgren pulled up a spreadsheet displaying his total subscription and donation-based earnings over 10 record-breaking days, in which he became the most-subscribed-to streamer on Twitch. The total, according to current estimations, is $471,756.
"However," Ahgren began, "it's not that easy. I don't get to walk away with all this money because there [are] things in life that you have to pay. That is called taxes. But even before we get to taxes, we have to talk about my cut. Because Twitch takes away money, so this isn't all mine. This is partly Twitch's."
Twitch's cut comes out to a hair over 35% because Ahgren negotiated his current contract in 2020 before he rose to his current level of stardom. That already brings the avalanche of cash careening toward his bank account down to $304,260. That's still an absurd amount of money! But then, Ahgren factored in a rough estimation of both federal and state taxes, which brought him down to $150,000.
kotaku.com
