A creator who was homeless while juggling three jobs and a degree – sleeping on the floor of a commuter ferry between shifts – has revealed she now averages £73,600 ($100,000 USD) a month.
Nixlynka was studying veterinary science and working in a veterinary lab, a pet store and a campus computer office at the same time, bringing in around £2,200 a month between them.
It was not enough to keep a roof over her head.
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“I did what I had to do to survive,” said Nixlynka, who posts on Instagram as @misanthropicjester.
“I slept on the floor of the Staten Island ferry, the ferry to go back and forth to the city, on the buses and on the subways.
“I don’t even know how I did it. I was young and I had a lot of energy and I had nothing else.”
She had been building a following through cosplay, making her own props and costumes and posting them to Facebook pages and Instagram.
When fans started asking for something else, she followed the money.
She said: “I needed money, and by that point that was what was in demand. So I listened.
“I didn’t really have a choice at that time, because like I say I was working all these jobs but I made more money doing this stuff, and I was homeless.
“I needed to do what made sense to get out of that situation.”
Within roughly six months she was earning enough to drop every other job, and the money has climbed ever since. On a good month it reaches £73,600.
She said: “I had no idea what I was doing. I just knew that it made sense.
“To me it always is whatever makes sense until it doesn’t make sense anymore.”
The change has been enormous. Eventually the income got her off the streets and into her own place.
But the achievement she is proudest of is not the money at all. After two years of streaming almost every day, she became a Twitch partner – and says that took far more out of her than any of the times she went viral.
She said: “Twitch partner took more work and effort than my popularity.
“I’ve been viral multiple times. I had a picture of my belly that was viral for years. I’ve had viral TikToks, interviews.
“But Twitch partner took a lot more consistent effort every day. It took me two years.”
She now streams to an audience of between 70 and 160 people, and splits her income between Twitch, clip sites and her own platforms.
Asked what has made the biggest difference to her growth, she is refreshingly unsure.
She said: “I honestly don’t know. I think it’s authenticity.
“I do a lot of different things at once. I work out, I like Godzilla, I play video games, I’m a nerd, but at the same time I’m very outdoorsy.
“I’m a big mix of things. I wouldn’t be able to know other than the fact that I’m just myself.”
Most of the people who end up paying find her through Twitter, with Instagram close behind. She runs the whole operation from Brooklyn, New York City, US, on her own, with a couple of editors to cut her stream clips and nobody else.
She said: “I’ve been doing it all solo. It’s a heavy burden.
“I’m very anal and I don’t trust many people.
“If you’re young and you have the drive you could do it, but within time you do get burnt out when you don’t have help.
“You will break down if you do it all alone.”
Her own biggest mistake, she says, has been stopping and starting.
She said: “Momentum is the biggest thing. I’m currently on a break from Twitch.
“Although there is income coming through, I know I could be growing my audience bigger there.
“Taking breaks too sporadically – that’s the biggest mistake for me personally.”
The bottleneck now is having too many ideas rather than too few. She wants to make youtube videos, open mic, poetry, music, art, tarot explainers, clown makeup, true crime videos and Godzilla unboxings, and cannot decide which to start with.
She said: “I’m getting in my own head with overthinking the content I should create.
“There’s so many things I want to grab and I don’t know what to grab first.”
For anyone trying to climb from a few thousand a month to five figures, her advice is unglamorous and, she says, badly underrated.
She said: “It really is consistency, and ensuring that you have good customer service skills.
“Knowing how to communicate with people, being friendly and kind, I think helps.”
She also spent a stretch vending at conventions – horror, anime and adult expos – selling stickers, shirts and silk-lined beanies, and wearing a lanyard printed with a QR code that took people straight to her Instagram.
She said: “I went online and looked up how I can make my Instagram a QR code link, then I put a picture of me and I made a lanyard and I just carried it with me.
“It helped bring in a different audience.”
Not every part of the job is so wholesome. The strangest request she has ever received involved a live animal, and she turned it down flat.
She said: “Someone wanted me to kill a live fish with my body.
“They wanted me to crush the fish until dead and have the tail slowly stop flopping to show I killed it.
“And I said no.”
She studied psychology and says requests like that leave her thinking about the person rather than the payment.
She said: “It’s created this repulsion inside. I’m not desensitised to it, it just saddens me.
“It reminds you that there’s people like that.
“It makes me think, what made them want to see that? I wish they could get help.”
What she most wants people to hear, though, is a warning rather than a success story – and she is aware that hers is the kind of story that makes the job look easy.
She said: “For anyone that’s considering it, that’s young, really think it through, because it could change your whole entire life.
“When you’re 18 you think you’re on top of the world, you feel sexy and hot, people are gonna pay for you.
“But that’s there forever. It will never go away. And everyone at some point will know.
“You have to be very thick skinned. You have to be sound mentally and have a good support system.”
She says she has lost people she knew in the industry, and believes the pressure on creators is badly underestimated.
She said: “The success stories are great. Like me, I was homeless.
“But there’s people that make more than me who take their life. You would think they have it all.
“There’s positives to being a content creator, especially if you’re comfortable with yourself. But there’s a lot of downsides.”
She also claims to have heard of agencies approaching girls before they are old enough to sign up.
She said: “There’s ones that do good to just get people to join and then they’re kind of stuck in a weird contract.
“Or there’s people that actually are scouting for 16 and 17 year olds, prepping them.
“The impressionable nature of being young and going into it, I think, gets preyed on too much.”
For herself, the next chapter is less about money and more about a stage. She wants Twitch sponsorships, a working YouTube channel, a return to cosplay – and, ideally, a microphone.
She said: “I want more opportunities to put myself out there.
“I’ve done open mic. It would be nice to have more opportunities to speak out and just be on a stage. I like to sing as well.
“I think I’m a good entertainer. I have a good stage presence. I just haven’t really had much opportunity.”
From sleeping on the floor of the Staten Island ferry between shifts to a Twitch partnership and a business she runs on her own, Nixlynka has already rewritten her story once. Now she wants a stage to tell it on.
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