Ludwig Reveals He Made Over $1.4 Million From His Twitch Subathon

Ludwig, Twitch‘s current top streamer, has confirmed that his month-long subathon made over $1.4 million – but he didn’t keep all of it, of course. From March 14 to April 13, Ludwig ran a 24/7 marathon stream to increase his subscriber count, ending off his stunt with a huge charity fundraiser.

It’s been clear that Ludwig made a lot of money during his subathon, as he managed to break Ninja’s subscriber record toward the broadcast’s end. This is thanks to the interesting structure of the stream, which ran on a constant countdown that could be extended by 10 seconds for each subscription received, which cost $5 each. By the end of the stream, he had over 280,000 subscribers, so it didn’t take a mathematician to know that Ludwig (and his charities of choice) walked away from the nonstop ordeal with full pockets.

A group of viewers made a slideshow for Ludwig to present on his YouTube channel, breaking down a number of analytics for the stream. According to the data, Ludwig spent a third of the stream sleeping (about 7 hours a day) and then the rest of the stream’s time was spent largely on variety of content, including from gaming, watching movies with viewers, and more. Adding up all the streams hours and the subscription time it took to sustain them tallies up to a grand total of $1,434,850.

That said, Ludwig doesn’t get to keep all of it. For starters, Ludwig spent $50k gifting subs to his own viewers in an effort to extend his stream’s time. The streamer paid his mods about as much $10k each for their time and also gave an additional $10k to fellow streamer Slime for taking over the subathon at one point, so his total administrative costs amount to around $177k. He also donated $365k to charity on the stream’s final day, and Twitch took $441,872 for its cut. In the end, after taxes, Ludwig took home a still incredibly impressive $202k, not including revenue from sponsorships and ads that ran during his stream.

It seems likely that Ludwig will continue to sustain a large amount of this money going forward, given subscriptions renew each month. Of course, some subscribers will cancel after the first month, but it seems unlikely he will continue to donate hundreds of thousands of his revenue to charity on a monthly basis (despite the tax benefits).

Ludwig’s ended his own stream “prematurely,” despite the fact it probably could’ve continued on for days, if not weeks. Understandably, the streamer was ready to be done after an entire month, but the entire stunt may have given his channel a long-term boost, as many subscribers came in toward the end to be part of his big moment. At the time of writing, Ludwig remains the most popular Twitch streamer, and it seems unlikely he will be dethroned soon.

Source: Ludwig

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Cade Onder
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Cade Onder is a 20-year old video game, movie, and chicken tender enthusiast. He has been writing about games since he was 14 and is always trying to learn more about the gaming industry. You can follow him on Twitter @Cade_Onder for bad jokes, bad takes, and pictures of chicken tenders.

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