How Dr. Disrespect Achieved a Net Worth of $3.5 Million
Twitch fans know that some of their favorite gamers can make a tidy sum from playing, and live streaming their games. As number five on the top twenty twitch earners for 2019, Dr. Disrespect is a household name for Twitch fans. With a reported average of $1.8 Million a year, the Doc and his mustache, which is known as “Slick Daddy” or “The Poisonous Ethiopian Caterpillar,” are raking it in with the ultimate dream job. So how does a guy with a mullet wig and a flak jacket make so much money playing video games anyhow? We’re about to reveal how Dr. Disrespect achieved a net worth of $3.5 Million.
Net Worth $3.5 Million
Name Herschel "Guy" Beahm IV
Age 38
Born Encinitas, California
Birth Date March 10, 1982
Source of Wealth American Twitch Streamer and Internet Personality
Country United States
The Two-Time
Every famous face has a ‘before’ story, and the Doc is no different. Born Herschel Beahm IV on March 10, 1982, this gamer was always a fan of playing videogames. Herschel as his gaming persona ‘Dr. Disrespect’ is known for his crazy rants. Sometimes he gets so upset he literally drools and has saliva running down his chin. That level of frenetic activity, peppered liberally with F-bombs, is, we admit, pretty amusing to watch.
The Doc once told a fellow gamer in a live stream that he’d better watch his mouth when talking to the “Two Time.” When the guy asked what that means, Herschel says he was the 1993-94 Blockbuster Videogame Champion. As it turns out, information is a little hard to come by about the Blockbuster Videogame Championships, but the real winners were unearthed by Reddit user Outcome 5, and Herschel was not one of them, in 1994. He is, however, a comedian (of sorts) who’s playing a character for his audience. We have to admire the commitment when it comes to doing that level of research to create a random brag for your gaming persona.
More Than a Mustache & a Mullet With a Good Line
While we wholeheartedly admire the commitment to his Dr. Disrespect character, some of what you see on Herschel’s Twitch stream isn’t just made up for kicks. When he brags that he’s six foot eight, that’s a bit hard to determine on a webcam. However, there’s no question that he’s quite tall. Perhaps because of his height, the Doc has also said he has a thirty-seven-inch vertical leap.
Being tall is one thing, but athletic prowess is not something we particularly expect from a person who’s made his career out of sitting around playing video games. During live filming of H3 Podcast, the host asked him how much of his random bragging was fact and how much was fiction. Naturally, the larger than life character had to claim it was all true. They took him out of the taping studio for a demonstration.
Again, some things are hard to tell on film, but he put his head through a roof tile on camera. We know that’s not exactly hard data, but he is a big guy who can jump a lot higher than we expected.
Herschel is also more than just a random guy who got good at gaming. He attended Cal. State Polytechnic in Pomona. We assume he went into a gaming adjacent field because, in 2011, he became the community manager of Sledgehammer Games. It’s possible that his salary from working there over the next four years contributed to his personal wealth.
Getting Twitchy
Though his first video was posted on January 11, 2010, while he played Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2. For a short time, he was featured in Machinima on Youtube. He stopped posting shortly after that and was absent from the platform for about five years. Presumably, this had to do with his position at Sledgehammer. However, it was during his time working for that company that he began developing his Twitch stream, back when it was still called Justin.tv.
Clearly, the Dr. Disrespect personality spoke to a lot of people because these days, he has over 3.7 million followers on the platform. In 2015 he quit his job at Sledgehammer and moved to full-time Twitch streaming. Most of his popularity comes from his bouts of battle royale style carnage.
Since 2015 the Doc has, for the most part, been posting regularly. In December of 2017, he took a two-month break from streaming after admitting to marital infidelity. He and his wife have a young daughter, and the hiatus was to mend his relationship. We haven’t found any reports of a divorce, so whatever he did during that time must have worked out.
Twitching for Pros
Twitch streamers like Dr. Disrespect make their money in several ways. Primarily the job consists of a cross between severe gaming addiction and the ability to commentate on the action as it occurs. Of course, if you want to make Doc level money, you also have to be good at winning and better at winning people over. Being funny and a bit crude seems to help.
The two main methods of moneymaking come from becoming a Twitch partner. Once you’ve gained enough followers and logged enough hours, you can join the partnership program. Joining gives you access to both advertising and subscriptions.
The subscriptions are simple. Viewers pay a monthly fee, just like they would to any streaming service, except they pay it to watch a particular channel that features someone like Dr. Disespect. Part of that fee goes to the platform, and the rest goes to the person streaming.
Advertising is a little different. Amazon owns Twitch, so ads work in a couple of different ways. First, you can choose to allow advertisements and decide which ads and how long they will run. Too many ads will cause fans to leave, and too few won’t make much money. When people watch and interact with the ads, the person who is streaming gets a nominal amount. You need quite a lot of viewers to make money this way. Twitchers can also add specific links for their viewers to purchase games. Usually, those are the games the stream is playing live. A small amount of revenue from those sales also goes to the streamer.
There are a couple of additional ways for most twitchers to make their rent. One method is through donations from fans, who can give them a dollar or more as a way of tipping and thanking the streamer for their content. Typically this gets the tipper a live shoutout, and the streamer thanks them by name for the donation. The final way Twitch streamers make their paper is through partnerships with sponsors. In the case of Dr. Disrespect, his sponsors include some big names like Gillette, ASUS, Razer, and G Fuel.
Final Thoughts
While playing games for a living might sound simple, the reality is anything but. Keeping up a constant and exciting line of banter with fans, and expressing thoughts and feelings about the games in real-time is a skill. Dr. Disrespect has earned his fortune through a combination of gaming prowess and comedy, plus a fair amount of business savvy. Do you think being a pro-Twitch streamer is a dream job, or would being on the spot all day, every day, make you too nervous to enjoy your game time? Let us know in the comments section.