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
