The subscriber count seems way off -- and subs don't appear in chat so I'm unsure how you're scraping from there. I know that imaqtpie has had single days where he got 700+ subs in a row (a 'sub train', where someone subscribes before a 5 minute timer counts down from the last subscription). 700 subs alone would be about 50% more than what you have his sub revenue at (e: *pre twitch cut) -- not counting existing subs which number (according to him) in the 5-7k.
I scraped data between 11/6/14 - 12/6/14 as mentioned in the article, the sub train event from qt was fairly recently so outside of my date range.
The subscribers do appear in the chat, I just sat 5 minutes in trick2g's chat and took a screenshot for you: http://imgur.com/MpOJ4CD
Now we can even get more data such as how frequently they subbed. This information wasn't there in november/december.
I've also mentioned in the FAQ that there were cases where the chat would freeze or another problem would occur and I would miss some subs. These are lower bounds but I highly doubt it's also as high as you are thinking. The sub train event is an outlier not part of the norm.
Many people on Twitch unsubscribe so they can subscribe again to get shoutout on the stream. How many subscribers out of those 700 were truly new? We don't know...
