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Looking to hear others experience on monetizing a hobby to donate earnings and how they've kept with it!

I was looking for ways to combine my love for gaming and charity. Back in 2020, I streamed games on Twitch for a few months to get donations for Malaria Consortium. Over the months, I only got a $5.

Then, I decided to do a Holiday fundraiser by streaming a scary video game for a week and sent it to all my friends and family. I raised around $650! It was amazing and got emotional during the last stream of it.

I continued streaming after that but I got burnt out with lack of viewers/money donations. It was then I preferred to game by myself and not to an audience. 

After that, I blogged about video games on a website for a few months last year that pays in cryptocurrency and have made around $65 worth in USD. I'm thinking about taking it up again as I stopped due to life/work bandwidth. 

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AFAIK @Joel Becker's introduction to EA was to find a good use for his earnings from his YouTube channel Messiseconds

Depends on the hobby and how good you are. Some things are relatively easy to monetize (you can teach lessons or do live performances), but even in those cases, you'll be competing with people who do your "hobby" as their job, and you're probably better off doing more of whatever your job is (working extra hours, freelancing...).

The thing I do is play games in tournaments, which is less common that streaming/gigging/etc., so this analysis may be of limited value, but: I've made something like $75,000 playing Magic: the Gathering and Storybook Brawl over the last four years (donating ~80% of that), but it took thousands of hours to do so, and a few unlucky turns of a card could have cost me most of the money. And I'm in the top 0.01% among people who try to play those games seriously in terms of success; many people roughly as good as me have put in more time to earn less.

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If I recall correctly, @Ben_West managed to resell his TikTok business for a decent sum.

This is true, although it's a lot easier to monetize your hobbies when your hobbies include "building B2B SaaS companies".

It's cool that you are doing this though! My impression is that it's hard to make much money as a streamer, but if you are able to do so, donating the money is great.

@Aaron Gertler has some experience fundraising from his MTG stream and may want to chime in :)

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