The ongoing saga of Kaitlyn "Amouranth" Siragusa took an interesting turn Wednesday when the streamer revealed the full financial impact of Twitch’s decision to remove advertising on her channel without first informing her. According to a comment she made on Reddit, the move alone could cost her as much as $40k a month, with the streamer estimating she made "35-40k a month re ads" in a reply to a Reddit thread.

This should better put into perspective why the reaction to her silent ban caused such an angry reaction on Twitter. For Twitch to remove that level of income from a partner without notifying them is bad enough, but the fact remains that Twitch is also yet to consistently apply their Terms of Service in a way that protects streamers from this sort of outcome.

It’s clear Amouranth was aware of the risks, replying to one reddit user that she had attempted to judge the situation before taking the plunge into hot tub streaming herself. "Everyone thinks of me as some kind of trail blazer, I'm never the first mover," she wrote in the thread. "I waited 2 months to see if twitch would do anything. I just relentlessly improve the formula as optimized for viewer count."

Aftermath of Amouranth's suspended ads

In the thread where she reveals her lost income, Amouranth also discussed making her business
"antifragile" and spoke about long-term plans to move away from her current model towards "more animal centric content/general lifestyle stuff". She seems aware that this sort of content has a limited time, and that at some point she will have to diversify, talking about plans for making her career more antifragile.

Since being demonetized, Amouranth has continued to steam from her pool, using the line "ONLY AD-FREE STREAMER ON TWITCH" in her description. With nearly 1M new followers since March and sitting close to her all-time sub count high of 20K, it seems like for the time being Amouranth is doing her best to turn lemons into lemonade, and it speaks to Twitch’s lack of strong position that she is still streaming and gaining subs (which profits Twitch) while blacklisted from making ad revenue.

Amouranth has unwittingly become the face of a conversation that will impact countless other creators using Twitch in the future. While her income doesn’t compare to the alleged $500k a month Tyler "Ninja" Blevins could rake in at his peak (not including creator code income), the loss of $360-480k a year is not insignificant, and shows the real-world impact of Twitch’s continued lack of clarification.