I've watched Hasan for around 4 years. He used to not run ads at all. Then Amazon forced him to start running ads. He told people to use ad blockers. Amazon told him that he wasn't allowed to say ad blocker. Then Amazon forces him to run 3 minutes of ads per hour instead of 1 minute per hour. Hasan is contracted by Amazon and Amazon controls certain aspects of the stream. Amazon also takes a huge portion of the money that Hasan receives.

However, Hasan can't change platforms because he would lose his whole audience. If you had a channel on twitch and you decided that you wanted to stream in a different way, you would also lose the majority of your audience. You can't self host a stream; we don't live in the 2000s anymore; most people don't want to make an account on a self hosted website; the internet is centralized now. If you moved your channel to youtube or other corporate owned site, you would just have a different corporation trying to squeeze profits out of you and still lose half your audience in the switch. So Hasan has to stay with twitch and twitch forces him to do certain things because as like every other employers, they want to extract surplus value.

Also, he allows his fans to monetize clips from his twitch stream on youtube. He has an official youtube channel which is run by his editors and he has said that all of the money from the youtube channel goes to those editors. Then there's like 50+ other channels which are fan run youtube channels, which get payed just for uploading editted clips from his stream. Youtube has tried to take down his fan channels several times and Hasan has gone out of his way to keep his fan's channels up so that his fans could make money from reuploading clips of his stream.

Complaining that Hasan gets payed money for being a journalist and news commentator is a real "you complain about capitalism and yet you exist" moment. He provides good news coverage. I've never given him money. I don't have a twitch account. I block ads. Watching the stream is free.

I've posted on Hexbear that I think Hasan has good news coverage since I joined hexbear 3 years ago. People told me that he wasn't a real Marxist, that he had bad opinions, or that they prefer to watch some fringe weirdos on tik tok who said Hasan is bad. They never actually watched his streams because even as far back as 2018-2019 Hasan was openly speaking in favor of Marxism. He went on chapo is 2019. From 2020-2021, he would still talk about Marxism but with more vague terminology because he was trying (and succeeding) at converting liberals into being Marxist. Lately he's again openly telling people that he's a Marxist and his audience has been shrinking because of it. Telling people that you're a Marxist doesn't make money, if his intention was to maximize his money, why is he telling people he's a Marxist now?

Before the Oct 7 Al-Aqsa Flood, Hasan was averaging 30k-40k live viewers. His average live viewership is now around 20k. Since doing coverage on the war in Gaza in support of Palestinians, calling for a ceasefire, for the past 4 months, Hasan has lost nearly half of his live viewers. He went from being a top 10 streamer on twitch to rank #30. If Hasan's purpose was "monetizing parasociality", why would he spend the last 4 months doing coverage in support of Palestinians which lost almost half of his live audience? Hasan's news coverage is a reflection of the correct Marxist perspective, even when it loses viewers. Calling for a ceasefire in Gaza loses viewers but Hasan does it anyway because it is the right thing to do.