November 23, 2024

Twitch Announces Pay Cuts For Top Streamers, And Everyone’s Mad

Twitch #Twitch

A picture taken at the Tokyo Game Show on September 21, 2018, shows the logo of the VOD and … [+] streaming video games company Twitch. (Photo by Martin BUREAU / AFP) (Photo credit should read MARTIN BUREAU/AFP via Getty Images)

AFP via Getty Images

Twitch purposefully scored a win on Tuesday when they banned at least some forms of gambling and gambling partnerships on its platform. But it was clearly as a precursor to worse news revealed on Wednesday, as they’ve announced pay cuts for their top earning streamers, and a lack of improvements for smaller ones.

Twitch has announced on Wednesday that “premium” creators who have received a 70/30 subscription split in their favor will now see that split capped after the first $100,000 of earnings. After that, the split will change to 50/50, which is the standard split for non-premium, “normal” Twitch streamers. The changes will not go into effect until June 1, 2023, and will not alter current Twitch contracts.

Twitch attempts to justify this by talking about boosts to ad revenue splits, but even if this affects the upper elite tier of streamers, here’s why everyone’s mad:

  • These top tier streamers feel like they helped build Twitch’s success (which Twitch even admits in the blog post) and the cuts are likely to potentially propel them to a rival like YouTube, which has a 70/30 split, once their contracts are up.
  • Non-superstar, normal streamers have been hoping that the opposite of this would happen, that the 50/50 split would be increased to 70/30 for everyone, and “taxing” the most successful creators is not helping them, as nothing significant changes positively for them.
  • This illustration picture taken on July 24, 2019 in Paris shows the US live streaming video platform … [+] Twitch logo application on the screen of a tablet. (Photo by Martin BUREAU / AFP) (Photo credit should read MARTIN BUREAU/AFP via Getty Images)

    AFP via Getty Images

  • This new focus on ads has everyone at all tiers upset given that ads drive away viewers and have already become more prevalent and aggressive on Twitch recently. No one is excited to lean more heavily into showing their viewers ads.
  • Through all of this, everyone is continually reminded that Amazon, the trillion dollar megacorp, owns Twitch, so these cuts feel unnecessary. Even if no doubt the mandate from the top is that Twitch itself needs to become more profitable, and can’t simply be subsidized by Amazon.
  • Twitch, as streaming market share leader, may still have the position to command these changes, and it’s citing video hosting costs as the reason for doing so, but it’s hard to know what the long term fallout from this might be. If YouTube maintains its 70/30 split you will no doubt see further and further migration in that direction, though there are admittedly relatively few competitors in the space overall since Mixer’s collapse and Facebook Gaming struggling to compete with Twitch and YouTube on the whole.

    It does feel like every new announcement and change out of Twitch is for the worse, and it’s no wonder that many are fed up with their policies. The headlines are never good, and quite literally, as I’m writing this, Bloomberg has just published an extensive report on how child predators have been using Twitch to track kids.

    Many of the most-affected Twitch streamers by the new split changes are likely still under contract, so we may have to wait awhile to see how many of them may leave. But it’s not clear how far Twitch an push its audience, but its equally unclear if a rival like YouTube will also leave its 70/30 split alone forever.

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