A new report on sponsored influencer activations suggests a pay gap between male and female-identifying creators across all video platforms, with women earning around 32% less than men.
These stats come from Collabstr, which counts sponsored streams or a video of any length in their metrics, and is based on a sample size of 2,414 gaming creators.
“We’ve seen a clear disparity in collaboration rates between male- and female-identifying influencers in the gaming space,” Collabstr co-founder Kyle Dulay told GamesIndustry.biz. “On average, male gaming influencers earn about $234 per collaboration, while female influencers earn roughly $160 – that’s a 32% pay gap.”
For context, we asked Dulay if the report featured any more nuanced detail on gender beyond binary self-identification. “Less than 1% of our users select ‘Other’ as their gender during the signup process, so there is not much we can pull here.”
Highlighting Twitch as a platform, that pay gap shrinks a little, according to Collabstr’s survey.
“When we narrow the focus to just Twitch, the gap closes slightly, but it’s still significant: female-identifying Twitch streamers earn about 27% less than their male counterparts per collaboration,” Dulay said.
“While the playing field is slowly leveling out on platforms like Twitch, the overall industry still has a long way to go toward pay equity for creators.”
When asked about broader creator trends and how gaming compares, Dulay draws attention to how the content is presented.
“Female creators tend to have more of a cross-over content style where they might include more lifestyle sort of content into their content style (fashion, cosplay, beauty, vlogs, etc..). Most male gamers are entirely dedicated to the gaming niche and there is less crossover into other content verticals. Quite often, men will not even reveal their face.
“Other than the advertising medium (Twitch, TikTok, etc..) there is not much difference between the way the actual collabs are structured versus other collabs we see.”
When it comes to the gender pay gap between creators, a few factors might be at work.
“The gender disparity for gaming influencers on platforms like YouTube or Twitch is much less than it is on platforms like TikTok or Instagram, and with YouTube and Twitch being popular platforms for gaming collaborations it would make sense that male gamers might get a higher share of collaboration volume,” Dulay said.
“Male creators also tend to have more focused content, where they exclusively showcase gaming, versus female creators who aren’t afraid to cross over into other content verticals (lifestyle vlogs, fashion, cosplay, etc..), and by being so niche, men can command higher prices.
“Overall, there is the macro problem that women also may be discounting their services versus their male counterparts.”