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:
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
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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