Twitch Rolls Out New Tiered Revenue Splits, Pissing Creators Off Yet Again
from the why-is-this-so-hard? dept
Amazon-owned Twitch appears to be running something of an experiment to see just how much it can piss off its creative community before a mass exodus occurs. Reading back through our posts on the platform, you will be left with the understanding that there are two types of policy rollouts when it comes to Twitch. There are the policies the company rolls out and almost immediately has to rescind after everyone gets wildly angry. And then there are the polices the company rolls out that result in just as much anger, but where the platform ignores the anger and gives its creative community the middle finger.
We’ll have to saddle up and wait to just which version Twitch’s latest policy update is, which focuses on how some larger streamers can still earn the 70/30 revenue split despite everyone else getting moved into a 50/50 split tier.
Twitch’s mid-life platform crisis continues. After rolling out controversial new 50/50 revenue splits for top streamers last fall, the massively popular online gaming hangout is now announcing a new “Partner Plus Program” that will return certain channels to the previous 70/30 split, but with tons of caveats. It’s already not going over well.
“We want to help streamers keep doing what they love, so we can all keep loving what they do,” Twitch tweeted on June 15. “Today we’re announcing the Partner Plus program, a new program for streamers to build toward as they continue to grow their businesses,” began the blog post it linked to. From there it outlined how the new program will work when it launches in October, including a bunch of hyper-specific details.
And it’s those details that are pissing off some portion of the creative community. To qualify, streamers must have 350 recurring paid subscribers and there is something of a progressive revenue system at play, where the 70/30 split in the program only applies to the first $100k earned. After that, all money earned reverts back to the 50/50 split that pissed everyone off.
In other words, this is both aimed at placating the platform’s larger streamers while also still clawing a huge portion of the revenue back both among small and larger streamers. And for a majority of those streamers, purely from a revenue sharing standpoint, it’s difficult to see what remains attractive about streaming on Twitch versus other platforms, such as YouTube. Especially for non-established streamers looking to build themselves on the platform.
Listening and communicating: this continues to be the challenge at Twitch and it’s frankly getting very frustrating to tread this same ground over and over again. The easiest way Twitch can lose ground as a platform is by pissing off its most important asset: the creative community. The optics of Amazon’s ownership certainly don’t help matters, given the huge sums of money Amazon already generates for itself.
So come on down from the crystal tower, folks. Come talk to your community and learn what makes them tick. And maybe, just maybe, build a platform around that community rather than trying to dictate to them when they have other options in the marketplace.
Filed Under: communications, revenue split, streamers
Companies: twitch
Comments on “Twitch Rolls Out New Tiered Revenue Splits, Pissing Creators Off Yet Again”
Devide at imperia
Very classic move since colonial era, devide user base and then intervene in behalf of “good side”
Given the current stream of bad policy decisions at Twitch, I have to wonder if Amazon is trying to kill it using the “Death by a thousand cuts” approach (instead of just admitting that they don’t want to keep Twitch operational and making an orderly shutdown plan).
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Or dealing with the idiots who run Twitch.
Twitch management is… the reason why Twitch is shit. Since 2016, at least.
No offense to its founders, but their recent ventures are… showing the same cracks as well…
I confess to not reading this article, but...
I hardly need to, as this is “the same old story, same old song and dance, my friends”.
This, coupled with the Reddit news and earlier moves by YouTube pretty much confirm that such platforms view money made that’s associated with it as rightfully the company’s. Letting you keep some value from your efforts is basically a tip for which such folks should be grateful.
The whole mindset lines up well with copywrong regulation, those who worked first deserve all the profits from the labor of those who create value that otherwise wouldn’t exist at all. It’s ‘oh, hey, you found a way to make money in a way we’ll never bother with doing, while also benefitting me?’
This is TechDirt, and we would do well to make some more relevant views, such as ‘the BoR in the 4thA assures us a right to be secure in our “papers”. Why does personal information written on paper count (sorta, these days) for that, but personal digital information doesn’t?
We have reached the point where the gov’t feels entitled to snoop through all the things we have written or otherwise communicated to third parties.
I’ve strayed, but I’ll leave it this way. I suppose the bottom line is that if you depend on free labor for site content, pissing off the contributors en masse is a very bad business model, regardless of what the accounting numbers say. In the end, it’s about selfishness that goes beyond a simple desire to gain a benefit, it’s about rigging the game and expecting folks to accept it.
Yes creators have other options but twitch is the most popular website for streaming games it’s ui interface is very well designed for users ,it has a great layout ,eg sections for games ,just chatting etc
It’s management are not in touch with it’s users ,they announce changes and then roll them back when there’s negative reactions from the most popular creators
YouTube seems the only exception to this ,eg see Reddit tik tok when services become very popular they start to make changes to increase revenue
when makes the service worse more ads more sponsored posts or videos from company’s that ,ll pay even if it makes the user experience worse
Reddits increase in charges for API access will have a negative effect for some users
I see that they want to move to the Hollywood split of continuing income, 0:100.
twitch?
Hah. Forgot all about Twitch with all the rhubarb on Twitter and Reddit.
I think these are great moves by all of these large platforms. Why? It’ll push a lot of people to find/build other platforms, which they likely would not have done otherwise.
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Nebula for streamers.
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Is this happening? People have been bitching about Youtube for like 15 years now, especially with regards to “Content ID”. But people seem to treat that as an unpredictable random event; they take the “strike”, maybe go to “copyright school” and bitch about it on social media, and continue using Youtube.
Well, for a while, some people moved to Vimeo, but I don’t see much of that anymore. And some went to Twitch…
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ContentID is not so much a YouTube problem, as a legacy publisher issue, where they use the power of the DMCA, while ignoring any and all cases of fair use and mistaken identification. All site allowing users to publish content get bombarded with take down requests, where the law says the must take the indicated content down. Content ID while abused to steal income,at least lets a lot of content stay up.
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No, Content ID goes well beyond anything the DMCA requires. It’s a private process with no judicial right of appeal. Other platforms, such as the Internet Archive, do not have it.