How to earn more money on your live streams with Gabbr

Most streamers earn from some mix of subscriptions, ad revenue and donations. All three have the same weakness. They rise and fall with how many people happen to be watching, and none of them give the viewer anything they can point at afterwards.

The trouble with donations

Donations work, and you should keep them. But look at what you are actually asking for. You are asking someone to give you money and receive, at most, their name read out. Some people are glad to do that. Most people, including people who genuinely like your stream, will not.

That is not stinginess. It is that there is nothing on the other side of the transaction. A viewer who would happily pay for something is not the same as a viewer who will donate for nothing, and the second group is always much smaller.

There is a second problem. Donations reward your most generous viewers over and over, and a lot of streamers end up quietly uncomfortable about that. The same handful of names, giving more than they probably should. An exchange where the viewer gets something real is healthier for everyone.

Selling time instead of asking for tips

A paid call is a straightforward trade. A viewer pays for a number of minutes and gets those minutes with you, live, on your stream. They are not donating. They are buying something that only you can sell.

That changes who is willing to pay. Somebody who has watched you for two years and never tipped once may well pay to actually talk to you, because now there is a reason to.

What it actually pays

You set your own price per minute, and you keep eighty percent of it. At two pounds a minute, an hour of calls is ninety six pounds to you. At five a minute it is two hundred and forty. You can change the price whenever you like, and raise it when your queue is consistently full, which is the clearest signal you are charging too little.

The billing is simple and worth understanding before you set a price. Calls are charged by the minute, and any part of a minute counts as a whole one, starting from the moment you answer. If a caller buys five minutes and the call ends after one minute and a few seconds, that is a two minute call and the three minutes they never reached are refunded to them.

Two things follow from that. You are paid for answering, not for stretching a call out. And a caller is never charged for time they did not get, which is the part that keeps people booking again.

Pricing it

Start lower than you think and raise it. A price nobody books is worth nothing, and an empty queue tells you less than a full one.

• If the queue is always empty, your price is too high or nobody knows the link exists
• If it fills the moment you go live, raise the price rather than taking more calls
• If it fills slowly and steadily, you are roughly right
• Set a maximum call length so one person cannot buy your whole stream

It does not replace anything

Calls sit alongside subs, ads and donations rather than instead of them. Most streamers run them as a segment, open the queue for half an hour, work through it, and go back to whatever they were doing. The people who did not want to call still watch, and quite often the segment is the part they stay for.

Getting set up

Sign up, pick your handle, set your price, and share your link. Connect a payout account when you are ready to withdraw, which you can do after you have taken your first call rather than before.

There is no monthly fee and no card needed to start. If you never take a call, it costs you nothing.