Who is Shroud?
Shroud is the nickname of Michael Grzesiek. He is a semi-retired Canadian Counter-Strike (CS): Global Offensive player from Toronto, Ontario. He was born there on June 2, 1994. He is currently living in Orange County, California, United States.
He started his gaming career joining teams like Slow Motion, Exertus, Manajuma and complexity. It was in 2014. He is also a backup CS player for Cloud9 since 2017 to concentrate on his Twitch streaming. He has been playing for the team since its launch in 2014 and rose to fame through his immense talent and popularity of his Twitch stream.
He currently does Twitch streaming on a full time basis and uploads the various highlights on his YouTube channel. He has been able to garner over 5 million followers on the platform and streams on a regular basis, boasting of 207 million views. One of the videos he streams are those of Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), one of the most popular online multiplayer games to date.
He also has a YouTube channel which he launched in 2014 and this has attracted more than a million followers which includes highlights from his Twitch streams.
Net Worth
He has an estimated net worth of $3 million. Shroud’s Twitch channel has over 5 million followers as of 2018. It is able to get an average of 25,000 viewers per stream and has amassed over 200 million views so far. It has over 45,000 paying subscribers and from these he gets an average of $2.50 per subscriber every month. This should lead to an estimated revenue of around $112,000 a month ($1.34 million a year). In addition, he also makes money from advertisements, sponsorships and donations from his followers. His YouTube channel also earns money for him, as well as through affiliate links such as Amazon Associate, G2A, Loot Create and HyperX.
Lest we forget, Twitch subscribers are streamers’ bread and butter. They really depend on these folks for money and to keep them coming, they must keep producing fresh material. People can subscribe for $5 a month to get unique emotes to use in a streamer’s chat. The big-time streamers like Shroud usually get a 60-70% percentage of the money earned from subscriptions.
Let us not forget he has been a competitive gamer. He has joined high-stakes tournaments and his wins netted him more than $200,000 in cash prizes. The biggest payout he ever received amounted to $40,000 at the ESL Pro League Season 4 Finals in 2016.
Twitch subscribers are streamers’ bread and butter. People can subscribe for $5 a month to get unique emotes to use in a streamer’s chat. The big streamers usually get a 60-70% cut of the money earned from subscriptions.
Donations are the second biggest income source for streamers. There is not much detail on how it works due to security reasons. Occasionally, donation stats get leaked out and this provides the only idea we have on how it works. From what can be gleaned, big streamers like Shroud usually make $1,000-$5,000 a day from donations alone. For instance, if Shroud can stream for 5 days a week, he would have amassed an extra $20,000 month at the minimum.