AUTISM INBOUND
When Shinji started holding out the collection cup he kept getting rebuked by everyone telling him to "just stream bro" as if this was some sort of panacea for every financial ill befalling him. This annoyed me because the whole premise was stupid on its face, Shinji sucked at streaming -- his initial streams were all disastrous because of his decision to restream cam girls or get copyright striked dead for watching MDE stuff, then there was just the fact he can't speak English well, so it was torturous for the audience to listen to him. But there is an undercurrent that ran all through Season 2, all the way back to Sam or Jet telling Megan that she could just livestream and escape wage slavery; this kind of flippant promise was made to Shinji and other cast members, and I wanted to see what the financials looked like on a "success story." Its taken a bit of time but I've finally trawled all but one stream of Tayleigh's to see if this is a viable career for standout cast members, because the Josie experience is a total aberration.
I intended to trawl Trish's and Jimmy's, I also contemplated Taylor's but she is on Twitch and I have no idea how to automate yanking some of the data for that site. Getting a read on Trish would get you a "mid ranking" post season livestreamer's experience and Jimmy would get you the typical "male experience" for a post season fish. For youtube superchats its simple because you can just yank the chatlogs using yt-dlp and with some json manipulation you can just add it together. The streamlabs donations are a bit of a pain in the ass, most streams had some sort of donation bar so you can just pan around and just count it up when it starts or reaches its goals and add them together, the real fucking ballbuster problem was when Tay started dealing with the incessent tornadoes which made her stop doing donation goals or gimmicks, this meant I had to literally watch the stream on 10-25x speed and just sit with a calculator doing 1+3+1+2+1 as the donations flew past, so there IS errors -- during the 24hr stream Tay would have media share videos playing loud noises and the donation box with its black text would be on a black background, nor could I hear what was said. But these donations were usually trivial sums like $1. There was a single stream I refuse to trawl, Tay's first crochet stream via her phone. There is no UI elements so I'd have to watch the full 2-3 hour stream at normal speed and listen for the audio cues stating the donation amounts, and from what I saw of the transcript, they're non-trivial amounts. The first donation was a $40 so the data could be off as much as $1000 if that first stream was incredibly profitable for her, but ultimately I suspect the error range to be around $300.
YT Superchats are its own column and some are missing because I just didn't trawl them using yt-dlp initially, so yes I did 6 streams on fastforward speed before I used my fucking brain. YT Superchats take a 30% cut and Streamlabs takes a 30c + 2% cut from paypal processing it, if you want Streamlabs exclusive just subtract the YT Super column from the combined one to the right. Digests are its own area as well because I feel like fishtank related media brings in a different crowd from the usual streamer's audience, and Tay's Digest reviews were particularly well structured and recieved, even if there was a lot of antics bookending each digest review segment during the stream, so the audience was far larger than her normal streams which is just reliant on her personality and fanbase alone. There is "M" for stream's at Maria's because I wanted to see if there was a significant difference in income for when Tay was away from home, there wasn't.
| | YT Supers | Total SL+YT Sup | | |
My New Home – Animal Crossing with Tay | 02/13/24 | | $199.77 | | |
Nook’s New Employee – Animal Crossing with Tay | 02/15/24 | | $185.30 | | |
Yarn it up – Crochet with Tay | 02/20/24 | $465.00 | $935.00 | | |
Tunes and TTS – Chillin with Tay | 02/22/24 | $95.00 | $1,074.64 | | |
On to new horizons – Animal Crossing | 02/27/24 | $81.00 | $235.34 | | |
Playing old games – Chillin with Tay | 02/29/24 | $210.75 | $586.15 | | |
My Cousin Niko | 03/05/24 | $221.15 | $281.55 | | |
Smell the leather with Tay | 03/06/24 | $75.00 | $478.00 | | |
Easybake Tayday | 03/12/24 | $19.00 | $19.00 | | |
Easybake Tayday Pt.2 | 03/13/24 | $158.95 | $776.78 | | |
Game Roulette with Tay | 03/14/24 | $84.00 | $445.92 | | |
Minecraft it up | 03/19/24 | $88.00 | $138.40 | | |
Game Roulette with Tay | 03/21/24 | $65.00 | $235.00 | | |
Time to game – Roulette with Tay | 03/28/24 | $44.00 | $314.28 | | |
Back to the dungeons = Fishtank DND | 03/29/24 | $6.00 | $171.00 | | |
Taypers Please | 04/02/24 | $42.00 | $177.40 | M | |
Tayleigh’s Pizzeria | 04/04/24 | $71.00 | $620.14 | M | |
Focus and Crochet with Tay | 04/09/24 | | $777.56 | | |
Scary Game Time with Tay | 04/11/24 | $41.00 | $441.00 | First half 24hr | Second half 24hr |
Tay’s 24 Hour Stream | 04/13/24 | $107.00 | $1,792.00 | $965.00 | $420.00 |
It’s time to scare the mime | 04/16/24 | $2.00 | $317.53 | | |
Tay’s gone postal | 04/18/24 | $15.00 | $102.65 | | |
It’s finally steak time - $1 TTS | 04/23/24 | $42.00 | $398.00 | M | |
Okay, I’m actually crocheting - $1 TTS | 04/25/24 | $42.00 | $334.67 | M | |
Game Roulette with Tay is Back | 04/30/24 | | $128.99 | | |
Going to Mario's Party | 05/07/24 | | $407.00 | M | |
Game Roulette Redemption with Tay | 05/14/24 | $10.00 | $161.88 | | |
Tayday Crochet Time With Maria | 05/21/24 | | $218.00 | M | |
Game Roulette Brain Worms | 05/23/24 | | $195.00 | | |
| | Streams Total: | $12,147.95 | | |
| | | | | |
Digest Week 1 | 02/17/24 | $0.00 | $643.38 | | |
Digest Week 2 | 02/25/24 | $212.00 | $871.99 | | |
Digest Week 3 | 03/03/24 | $168.99 | $653.66 | | |
Digest Week 4 | 03/10/24 | $119.00 | $555.19 | | |
Digest Week 5 | 03/18/24 | $89.00 | $209.40 | | |
Digest Week 6 | 03/26/24 | 58.99 | $738.99 | | |
| | Digest Total: | $3,672.61 | | |
| | | | | |
| | Grand Total: | $15,820.56 | | |
Just rounding up we have about $16k in donations give or take a few hundred dollars in any direction. This isn't her only income, obviously she has been doing a one woman sweatshop with her crochet business which is a black box to us, we just have vague numbers like "200+ beanies" without reference to designs or custom orders, the total income from that could range from something as low as 4k to as high as 10k if every single item was the most expensive option and there was 100% fulfillment with nobody ghosting her, we'll never know. The other source of 'income' would be her Amazon wishlist stuff being purchased. Some of them are business related such as her costumes: mime, Star Trek uniform, pirate hat, stasi hat and the niqab she just wore, or the steamdeck she got on her final stream. The steamdeck is $300 so this is almost the same as a full stream's worth of donations, not to mention the huge number of records she has had purchased for her. I'd have to literally watch the streams and find each item on Amazon to calculate this, not going to happen, but I'd spitball the range to be definitely above $1k but certainly below $3k. The wishlist items are a vague form of 'income' because its not really clear if Tay would be buying all these records with the money she makes, I suspect she is frugal enough that she wouldn't, they're a luxury that she is overjoyed to have gifted to her.
Some of the more well regarded streams such as the "Tay’s gone postal" has an extremely low donation amount because she seemingly just didn't give a shit about driving donations, she just dressed up in a rain coat and just had fun making Matrix references and other jokes. Some of the other streams such as "Tayleigh’s Pizzeria" she structured quite well with donation goals and challenges like flat $50 donations to fuck up the pizza she was making. Her most profitable streams always feature some sort of donation goal or challenge whether it be chugging redbulls, eating internet meme hot chips, ez-bake bug cakes or the wig and mime reveals. Even her disasterous stream "Going to Mario's Party" was actually quite profitable for her because of the challenges, something that ended up ruining the stream because she downed 3 or 4 fireball whisky shots early, got shithouse drunk, slumped over and just went largely unresponsive to chat/tts.
I was going to project the data onto graphs and stuff to see if there was any patterns to be found but ultimately the only thing I can come up with is this, if Tay wants a stream to make a lot of money she'll structure it as such, for the most part she doesn't, she sets the TTS to the lowest possible price and just socializes. I believe Tay could probably survive off streamer income but its certainly not a long term option, during late Feb through March getting donations was easy and is where most of the money is derived from, she has to really grind now and there was a distinct sense that she was losing momentum through May because she kept getting streams canceled by tornado activity or bad storms killing either her internet or leaving her without electricity.
If I do Trish or Jimmy it will be a bit of time from now, this was tedious as fuck and both of them are noted for having scuffed streams, Trish does a lot of IRL streams and Jimmy's setup is almost purposefully scuffed. There is no real way to automate the collection of streamlabs data weeks or months after the stream ended so I'd probably get stuck in the fastforward calculator hell again.