Becoming a gaming content creator can be a fun way to create a community out of your love for games. Across YouTube, Twitch, and other platforms, there are thousands of gaming content creators who share gameplay, tips, put on live streams, and have built loyal audiences who tune in for both the entertainment and their shared passion for gaming.
Some of those content creators have even got such a large follower count that they earn money from doing it. On both YouTube and Switch, if you earn more than 1,000 followers, there are ways for you to start monetising your content, which includes earning money through ad revenue, viewer donations, channel memberships, and even brand sponsorships. This begs the question, if you’re thinking about becoming a gaming content creator, are you technically running a small business?
The Thing About Business
One of the best ways to understand if you’re really ‘running a business’ or not is whether you can get insured as a business entity – even as a sole proprietor, with no employees to speak of. Insurance companies don’t care about your follower count or what kind of games you stream – they care about whether your work carries risk, delivers value, and has an operational structure.
If they’re willing to insure you, it means what you’re doing is considered legitimate commerce, not just a casual activity. A big clue, then, could be looking at one of the insurance platforms that has a wide range of customers, not just traditional brick-and-mortar businesses.
Next Insurance is a good option. If you were to look for small business insurance by Next Insurance, you’d find over 1,000 professions to choose from, with three particularly relevant ones being: videographer, actor, and entertainer.
All of these categories cover the operations of a gaming content creator, and so yes, if you’re streaming and starting to make money from your streams, your work is seen as a legitimate business activity that can be insured. After all, hobbies don’t usually need liability coverage or equipment insurance. But businesses do.
Making Money from Gaming Content Creation
With that in mind, how exactly do you turn this kind of hobby into a business? Looking at YouTube and Twitch, specifically, the process is a little different. As we mentioned before, for YouTube, you’re going to need over 1,000 followers, but you’ll also need to have accumulated at least 4,000 watch hours on your videos within the past twelve months to qualify for the YouTube Partner Program, which allows you to monetise your channel through ads and channel memberships.
On Twitch, the path starts with becoming an ‘Affiliate’. This means you need at least 50 followers, and you need to have streamed for a minimum of 7 unique days, maintaining an average of 3 concurrent viewers in the last 30 days. From there, you can then start earning money through subscriptions, ‘Bits’, and ads, and potentially even become a Twitch Partner, which gives you even more monetisation avenues.
The process of doing all this, however, is going to be difficult. While it might seem easy to jump onto a streaming platform and immediately start building an audience, you have to remember that, just like any other business landscape, there’s a lot of competition. In 2025, for instance, there are over 207 million content creators at last count, and although not all of those creators will be in the gaming space, it’s certainly a hot space that’s constantly welcoming new creators into the mix.
With this in mind, it’s important to stand out by offering something fresh and authentic. It’s an interesting business proposition, because you’ve almost got to pretend you’re not running a business at all. If your viewers sense that you’re doing it for money, they can quickly tune out and make the process of building that follower base difficult.
So make sure you go back to the reason you want to do this in the first place: your love for gaming. If you focus on your passion and building a genuine connection first, letting your love for gaming shine through, monetisation opportunities will naturally follow. Only then will you be in business!