Where Gaming Influencer Money Actually Goes: YouTube, Twitch and TikTok in 2025

Gaming influencer marketing spend in 2025 splits almost evenly between YouTube ($1.20 billion, 43%) and Twitch ($1.13 billion, 40%), with TikTok at $0.31 billion (11%) and Instagram at $0.11 billion (4%). And 64% of the $2.8 billion goes to PC and console games, not mobile — Twitch money comes almost entirely from them.

That breakdown divides the market estimate we published in How Big Is the Gaming Influencer Marketing Market? — $2.8 billion in 2025, global excluding mainland China, counting creator fees plus agency and platform commissions and excluding paid amplification. Same scope, same year, same definition: the platform figures below add up to that total. (That article's $0.76 billion mobile and $1.33 billion PC/console figures come from one method alone; scaled to the combined $2.8 billion base, the 36/64 split is unchanged.)

The industry assumes the opposite. Mobile is where the advertising money is, so mobile is assumed to be where the creator money is. It isn't — and the reason is visible in which platform each half of the industry buys.

How Gaming Influencer Spend Splits by Platform

Zorka.Agency market model, calendar 2025, global excluding mainland China. Creator fees plus agency and platform commissions; paid amplification excluded. Base case of a $1.5–4.7 billion corridor. Rows may not sum due to rounding.

Two things stand out. YouTube and Twitch are effectively tied — the three-point gap between them sits well inside the uncertainty of either estimate — and together they take 83% of the market. And the two platforms get their money from opposite halves of the industry: about 60% of YouTube's gaming influencer spend comes from mobile games, while 98% of Twitch's comes from PC and console.

Kick is deliberately not given its own figure. It drew 4.5 billion hours watched in 2025, 12.4% of tracked live-streaming hours outside TikTok Live (Stream Hatchet, 2025 yearly report), but in 181 documented game campaigns we found no paid activation on it at all. Kick pays creators directly through its partner programme rather than selling brand integrations, so its audience has not yet turned into influencer inventory. A point estimate for a market that barely exists would be false precision.

Why PC and Console Games Put Most of Their Creator Budget on Twitch

Within PC and console, Twitch takes about 62% of influencer spend, YouTube 27%, TikTok 6% and Instagram 3%. Campaign-level data from 2025 launches shows why the model lands there.

Launch-window estimates by Streamforge's creator market rate algorithm, published by Nick Lombardi in Videogame Marketing Deep Dives, 2025. Estimates, not publisher-confirmed figures.

Twitch's share of the launch budget ranges from 45% to 100%. It is rarely where the views are. Mecha BREAK put 90% of its budget on Twitch for 28.8% of views, while TikTok delivered 47.4% of views on almost no paid spend (Lombardi). Clair Obscur put 73% on Twitch for 29.5% of views (Lombardi).

The price per view explains the gap. In the same campaign, DOOM: The Dark Ages paid $756 per thousand views on Twitch, $148 on YouTube long-form, $17 on YouTube Shorts and $8 on TikTok (Lombardi). A premium launch buys Twitch for something short-form does not sell: hours of live gameplay in front of an audience deciding whether to buy the game that week. PC and console titles also have no install-attribution loop to optimise against, so a channel that looks expensive per view is not penalised by the measurement the way it would be on mobile.

The same pattern holds beyond these launches. Across 181 documented game campaigns, 17 PC and console campaigns were bought on Twitch alone — and not a single mobile one was. Ten of those 17 come from one Twitch-only sponsorship platform, so the count overstates the pattern; the absence of Twitch-only mobile campaigns does not depend on it.

Where Mobile Game Influencer Money Goes

Mobile is a YouTube market. About 71% of mobile games' influencer spend goes to YouTube, 19% to TikTok, 6% to Instagram, and Twitch takes about 3% in the model — up to 7% in raw campaign counts. It is published as a 3–7% range because our sources disagree on it by more than twice.

Genre sets the second level. In campaign data, midcore RPG, 4X and strategy titles buy YouTube almost exclusively — the integration model RAID: Shadow Legends made famous. Casual, puzzle and fashion titles lean to TikTok. Anime and licensed-IP titles buy YouTube and TikTok together, with Twitch absent. Among 68 mobile campaigns, Twitch out-weighted YouTube exactly once: Erica, an interactive FMV game whose mechanics depend on live audience voting.

The TikTok figure deserves caution in one direction. Several case libraries fold TikTok into a generic "short-form" line, and others mention it without counts, so the observed share is a floor rather than a central estimate. If TikTok is under-measured anywhere, it is in mobile.

How This Split Was Calculated

No public source reports influencer spend by platform, so the split is modelled from three independent chains of evidence, each built from different data:

1. Campaigns (58% weight). 181 documented game campaigns with a platform split — 82% of them from 2023 onward — drawn from agency case libraries, independent panels and trade press, plus the nine 2025 launches above with published budget estimates. Where vendor libraries skew towards their own product (a Twitch-only sponsorship platform, a YouTube-only buyer), that bias is noted and down-weighted.
2. Attention (30%). Hours watched by platform in 2025 (Stream Hatchet), adjusted by the sponsored share of viewing and by the price per view on each platform.
3. Media panel (12%). Sensor Tower's measured US PC and console ad spend by channel (via GameDev Reports), used only for shape: panels track paid ad placements and cannot see creator deals.

The blended platform shares within each half are then scaled to the mobile and PC/console totals from the market estimate. The weights were fixed before any data was collected. One input was dropped after the fact, and we say so: a 2021 single-title case (RAID: Shadow Legends) measured by a YouTube-centric panel, which pulled every mobile cell towards YouTube.

Where the three chains disagree by more than a factor of two on a cell, the protocol publishes a range instead of a point — which is why mobile Twitch appears as 3–7% above. YouTube and Twitch are rated medium quality because the chains agree on them; TikTok, Instagram and Kick are rated low because they do not.

What This Means If You Are Planning a Budget

If you market a PC or console game, you are competing for Twitch inventory against most of your industry's creator spend. The price per view will look indefensible next to TikTok. The case for it is depth of attention in the launch window, and the realistic move is to pair it with short-form for reach — which is exactly what the best-balanced launches above did.

If you market a mobile game, the market has already voted for YouTube integrations, and your TikTok share is probably under-counted rather than too low. Twitch is a genre exception, not a default line in the plan.

If you are comparing platforms by audience size, don't. Kick has an eighth of tracked live-streaming hours and almost no paid inventory. TikTok carried nearly half the views of a Twitch-led launch on no budget. Attention and spend are different maps.

FAQ

How much do streamers get paid for sponsored streams?

On Twitch, sponsored streams are priced by concurrent viewers, not followers: $0.50–2.50 per average concurrent viewer per hour, with $1.00–1.25 the standard rate in the US (StreamScheme, InfluencerFee, 2024–2026). That puts a 50–500 viewer stream at roughly $50–300 an hour and a 2,000–10,000 viewer stream at $1,500–10,000 or more. In 2025 PC and console launch campaigns, Twitch cost $400–1,022 per thousand views, according to Streamforge estimates.

How much does RAID: Shadow Legends pay YouTubers?

In the second half of 2021, Plarium spent $8.66 million on YouTube creators for RAID: Shadow Legends — about 94% of the game's influencer budget for that period. The average integration cost $4,190, across 5,330 mentions and 442.95 million views, for a CPM of $19.55. US creators averaged $11,800 per ad. These are 2021 figures reported by Game World Observer; no comparable disclosure has been published since.

How should I approach sponsored streams?

Treat sponsored streams as a launch-window depth buy, not a reach buy. In 2025 PC and console launches, Twitch took 45–100% of influencer budgets while typically delivering under a third of views; short-form covered reach at a CPM roughly 20–90 times lower. Price streamers by average concurrent viewers rather than followers, and pair a Twitch buy with YouTube Shorts or TikTok for the reach Twitch does not deliver. Our Twitch sponsorship guide covers formats and deliverables.

What are gaming influencer rates on YouTube, TikTok and Twitch?

Gaming is a low-CPM niche on YouTube: sponsored integrations cost $10–25 per thousand views, based on 164,963 sponsored gaming videos (SponsorRadar, 2026). Short-form is cheaper still — $8–24 CPM on TikTok and $8–59 on YouTube Shorts in 2025 launch campaigns — while Twitch streams cost $400–1,022 CPM in the same campaigns (Streamforge estimates, 2025).

Where This Came From

This split was produced as internal research at Zorka.Agency and published alongside our market size estimate, because nobody else publishes platform-level spend for this category. The model was calibrated against first-party campaign data from 25 gaming clients; those figures are not disclosed, and no client's spend appears in this analysis.

For campaign-level numbers — CPM by country, click-through by creator category — see our gaming influencer benchmarks. For how we run each platform, see Twitch, YouTube, TikTok and Instagram campaigns.