NICKMERCS became the face of Kick gaming earlier this month after signing a new, non-exclusive contract with the streaming platform—and he’s already shedding light on his previous deal with Twitch.
In a clip from one of his recent livestreams, NICKMERCS claimed that in his past contracts with Twitch, he typically didn’t receive much, or any, of his subscription revenue because of a “minimum guarantee” that was in his contract.
While NICKMERCS certainly wasn’t hurting for money, he explained that his contract with Twitch that gave him a stable source of income effectively made it so he didn’t necessarily feel the impact of singular subs or even sizable numbers of gifted subs.
“For a long time now, and I don’t know how you’re going to feel about me telling you this, but I’m just going to tell you, I didn’t see any of that,” he said. “I got paid a fixed amount no matter what. So when someone comes into the stream, and they gift 100 [subs] … I appreciate that, that’s love, but that’s not mine.”
NICKMERCS then went on to explain that his Kick deal is more lucrative because he not only gets an “MG,” which is an abbreviation for “minimum guarantee,” but he also still gets a percentage of his subscription revenue.
In a reply to a post on social media that originally shared the clip, former head of gaming at YouTube Ryan “Fwiz” Wyatt noted that having an MG as a trade-off for some amount of sub revenue is a regular practice for platforms when making deals with especially prominent creators.
“This was pretty normal across creator deals,” he said. “You need to recoup ad and non-ad revenue as you’re paying an MG that largely is more than what you’ll recoup, hence, these creator deals were largely loss leaders for all companies.”
A “loss leader” in the streaming marketplace is effectively a content creator who is so popular that a platform is willing to pay a premium for them because of the influence they have on the overall streaming marketplace. While it might not seem like the platform is making money off of its contract with the creator, they provide an intangible impact and influence that make them worth paying more money for.
Though Wyatt’s comment makes it seem like NICKMERCS’ statement is common knowledge in the streaming space, many fans seemingly learned today that their subscription money might not directly go to the streamer they’re trying to support.
