I have been following these twitch TV online casino marketers for a year (they differ greatly from the guys that play live on youtube) or so now because I was curious how they were making their money. It was obvious these streamers were under sponsorship deals, but it also appeared they were playing with their own money versus "play" chips.
It turns out they are playing with their own money. But the marketing scheme Stake and others came up with is genius. They essentially pay streamers a TON of money to play on their sites. Sometimes millions a week. But they are paying these streamers to play high stakes on their sites. If they dont play high stakes on their site they lose their value in the marketing sense. This creates an environment where streamers are essentially losing back a ton of the marketing money they are getting back to the same people that paid them (the casinos). While none of these streamers will be broke, imagine paying one of the top streamers in the world a ton of money for a year of their time to market to their fan base only to get nearly all of it back.
Yes, the streamers could take a payout from the casinos and just keep it but then the casinos would simply cut them off. So these streamers are constantly promoting the casinos to see if they can hit that big pay day because this is the only chance they have to beat the odds. What they dont realize is that with online slots
(especially with these flat bets, auto spins and hours they play) there is simply no way to win. They are essentially slaves to the online casinos. This one streamer Trainwreck one 23 mil a few weeks back on a jackpot only to lose it back over the course of 2-3 weeks. He plays 1500 a spin on two virtual slot machines at the same time on "turbo" mode and can lose 3k every second. It is insane.
Drake and other celebrities dont fit this model because they likely just get a flat rate because their value is in their celebrity but this video really breaks down what is going on and found it interesting.