A new report has made the claim that Nick ‘NICKMERCS’ Kolcheff is the highest-earning Twitch streamer – ahead of even Turner ‘Tfue’ Tenney, Felix ‘xQc’ Lengyel and Dr Disrespect, to name a few.
Nick has no doubt been a successful streamer for some years now, more so when he made the switch from Call of Duty to Fortnite, and can consistently be found near the top of the Twitch viewership list – though wouldn’t commonly be considered the biggest streamer on the platform.
However, this comprehensive list places Nick firmly atop the highest earners, despite only having half the followers Tfue has in second place.
The Little Loans report claims that Nick earns $1,516,358 in annual subscription earnings – not including any donations he gets through each stream.
Close behind him is Tfue, who allegedly makes $1,414,518 in annual subscriptions, while Tim ‘TimTheTatman’ Betar is the third-highest at $1,378,412. According to the report, there are five other streamers that make more than $1m from subscriptions: Dr Disrespect, MOONMOON, xQc, AdmiralBahroo and Jaryd ‘Summit1G’ Lazar.
Apparently Nick actually has less annual subscribers than both Tfue and Tim, which definitely raises the question of how he’s earning more than both with less subscribers.
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The report states that Nick makes more than the others because of the number of Tier 3 subscribers he has, who pay $25 a month rather than the standard $5 Tier 1 subscription. He has 13,513 Tier 3 subscribers, which is around 10,000 more than Tfue and almost 12,000 more than Tim – and that totals to a lot of money.
Since the report focuses only on Twitch, it doesn’t factor in big streamers who have moved to rival platforms such as Tyler ‘Ninja’ Blevins and Michael ‘shroud’ Grseziek, who both switched to Mixer in 2019.
The report states that they have estimated net worths of about $10m and $4m respectively, so could be in decent contention with Nick if they were still with Twitch.
Of course, we can’t verify that these figures are completely accurate and, even if they are, the fact that donations aren’t included definitely leaves some leeway to question whether Nick is actually the highest earner when all numbers are added up.
That said, we know he’s doing pretty well for himself: at the end of 2019, he revealed the insane gaming studio he has set up, which can’t have come cheap, and shows that he’s got some serious money to re-invest in his career.
