cormack12
Gold Member
Source: https://www.jacobwolf.report/p/char...s-off-twitchs-mostwatched-fundraising-streams
Five of Twitch’s most-watched men are sitting in front of a long, white table inside the living room of an Austin, Texas, home. Over the next eight and a half hours, Asmongold, Mizkif, Esfand, Nmp and Rich Campbell will unbox some of the rarest Pokémon cards in the world, worth thousands of dollars.
By the end of the eight and a half hours, the five men raised more than $600,000 for Games for Love, a Washington state-based charity focused on video game distraction therapy for terminally ill children. Before 2020, the charity had never raised more than $50,000 in a single year, according to tax records. But then, when those five members of OTK led more than 37 influencers who ran campaigns for it throughout the next two years, it raised nearly $2 million in donations.
Yet, according to public records, almost half of that money never went to charity.
Behind the scenes, an Atlanta-based marketing company called Softgiving played middleman between the charity and a who’s who of Twitch and YouTube—the likes of OTK, Ludwig Ahgren, aDrive, JustaMinx and other influencers both big and small. And Games for Love wasn’t the only beneficiary.
In 2020 and 2021, Softgiving and those influencers raised a total of $6.2 million in donations, according to publicly available tax records. Yet $2.6 million of that—roughly 42 percent—went to Softgiving to cover its commission and expenses, including influencer fees, those public records show.
In the course of this investigation, The Jacob Wolf Report conducted more than a dozen interviews with influencers, their agents and managers, non-profit industry leaders, academics, attorneys, accountants, competing brand marketing agencies and the charities themselves, many of whom spoke on the record. We also examined more than 250 pages of documents, including public tax returns, partnership contracts, correspondence and web archives for many streams that occurred over that two-year period.
Softgiving compensated itself with roughly $2.6 million of the donations—or approximately 42 percent of the money raised—according to public tax records. The company declined to comment on how much of that went to its bottom line, versus how much of it went to the influencers when asked.
Five of Twitch’s most-watched men are sitting in front of a long, white table inside the living room of an Austin, Texas, home. Over the next eight and a half hours, Asmongold, Mizkif, Esfand, Nmp and Rich Campbell will unbox some of the rarest Pokémon cards in the world, worth thousands of dollars.
By the end of the eight and a half hours, the five men raised more than $600,000 for Games for Love, a Washington state-based charity focused on video game distraction therapy for terminally ill children. Before 2020, the charity had never raised more than $50,000 in a single year, according to tax records. But then, when those five members of OTK led more than 37 influencers who ran campaigns for it throughout the next two years, it raised nearly $2 million in donations.
Yet, according to public records, almost half of that money never went to charity.
Behind the scenes, an Atlanta-based marketing company called Softgiving played middleman between the charity and a who’s who of Twitch and YouTube—the likes of OTK, Ludwig Ahgren, aDrive, JustaMinx and other influencers both big and small. And Games for Love wasn’t the only beneficiary.
In 2020 and 2021, Softgiving and those influencers raised a total of $6.2 million in donations, according to publicly available tax records. Yet $2.6 million of that—roughly 42 percent—went to Softgiving to cover its commission and expenses, including influencer fees, those public records show.
In the course of this investigation, The Jacob Wolf Report conducted more than a dozen interviews with influencers, their agents and managers, non-profit industry leaders, academics, attorneys, accountants, competing brand marketing agencies and the charities themselves, many of whom spoke on the record. We also examined more than 250 pages of documents, including public tax returns, partnership contracts, correspondence and web archives for many streams that occurred over that two-year period.
Softgiving compensated itself with roughly $2.6 million of the donations—or approximately 42 percent of the money raised—according to public tax records. The company declined to comment on how much of that went to its bottom line, versus how much of it went to the influencers when asked.
. Hell even the charity organiser published cherry picked stats showing 18% going to streamers.
