This Florida millennial makes over $3,000 a month playing video games

In a cozy Kendall bedroom, Natasha Walsh is surrounded by a PlayStation 5, a buzzing gaming computer and two computer screens.

A neon sign spelling out “Barefoot Tasha,” Walsh’s stage name, fills the room with soft, pink lighting. For five hours every night, thousands of people around the world watch her play video games.

“This is my purpose,” Walsh told the Miami Herald. “This is what I’m meant to do. I also just have always had a passion for entertaining people.”

At 32, she has found a way to monetize that passion and reach people around the world. Walsh now makes a living by streaming on Twitch, a social media platform where gamers can play against each other and broadcast their screens for other people to watch. She has over 40,000 followers on Twitch, and some pay as much as $25 a month to watch her streams without ads and have other perks. She also receives revenue from posting videos and streaming live on YouTube.

It’s been five years since she’s had a “normal” job.

Walsh grew up in a tight-knit Jamaican family and — starting with the first Nintendo Entertainment System — always had a love for video games and anime. But before she became a professional streamer, cooking was the passion she thought she wanted to turn into a career.

After graduating from Kendall’s Felix Varela Senior High School in 2010, Walsh studied culinary arts at Miami Dade College with the dream of one day becoming a chef on TV. For the next several years, Walsh worked as a server and a hostess and played video games whenever she had time.

As she learned more about the hospitality industry, she decided that the pressures of a restaurant were not for her.

“I told myself that the kitchen was such a stressful environment run by men, and I didn’t want to be stressed in a kitchen pumping out 150 steaks by the end of a night in a restaurant,” she said.

After becoming a fan of women streamers like Pokimane, Walsh started to build her own setup for streaming and began monetizing her own Twitch in 2019. Building a following was difficult early on, but Walsh remained diligent and once even streamed for 24 hours straight.

At the beginning of 2020, Walsh was working as a server at the Ritz Carlton in Key Biscayne when the pandemic began and forced the hotel to temporarily close. Walsh began streaming full-time, and when she was called back to work that summer, declined to fill her old job.

“I [wasn’t] about to go to work, get sick and then come home and possibly get my family sick,” she said. “So I just told them, no, I’m not coming back.”

A moment clouded by uncertainty ended up putting Walsh on a new level.

As Walsh spent more time streaming, her online following grew, and she began making more money. With much of the world on lockdown, her paid subscribers on Twitch grew to 2,000, which was the highest amount of subscribers she’s had on the platform yet. She found a community of Black women gamers like her that she is still friends with today.

“I feel like women, especially Black women, have a space here,” she said. “I’ve met so many women — Black women and women of color — in this space, and a lot of them have become the closest friends that I’ve ever had in my life.”

The business side of streaming quickly became clear to Walsh as a creator. She grosses nearly $5,000 a month as a Twitch partner and splits half of that with the streaming platform. Almost all of her 800 paid subscribers pay $5.99 a month, with a handful paying $25 a month.

On YouTube, Walsh has nearly 30,000 subscribers and uploads about five videos a week. The platform’s revenue split with creators focuses more on time spent viewing videos and the ads that can be placed within them.

Walsh had her biggest month on YouTube to date last month and earned $800. “I’ve been posting more consistently,” she said.

Streaming full-time has taught Walsh about the ups and downs of self-employment. Some months may feature paid brand sponsorships or exclusive opportunities, while others don’t. Working from a place of love for gaming, she stays the course and doesn’t look for shortcuts like going viral.

“Going viral is cool, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to build a community off it,” she said.

Working as a woman in gaming can also have its challenges. Walsh considers herself a free spirit and came up with the name Barefoot Tasha to represent her easygoing personality. At the time, she didn’t think about any unintended implications. However, some male viewers still ask her on a regular basis what the name means and if they can see her feet. She always declines.

Even though Walsh makes her living as a streamer, she is quick to point out that she is in a particular niche of the internet. People that she vaguely knew in high school sometimes reach out after seeing her high amount of online followers to ask for advice about creating lifestyle content.

“For a while I felt like an anomaly, specifically in Miami, because I feel like Miami’s culture is so different,” she said. “In Miami, if you make content it’s [often] rich-people content like, ‘I’m driving my Lamborghini. I’m living in a high-rise. I’m on the beach.‘”

With more than 100,000 followers across Twitch, YouTube and Instagram, Walsh has come a long way in the gaming space from the small gray Nintendo controller she played with as a little girl.

“I’m going to be one of the bigger Black female content creators in this space,” she said. “If I keep working hard and I keep doing what I’m doing, I’m on the right path.”