Twitch is the most popular game streaming service on the internet, but it can face challenges when trying to retain the most popular streamers.
company on wednesday Said It reduces the subscription revenue it shares with some of the service’s biggest streamers, shrinking the cut from 70% to 50% in certain circumstances.
Having lost several popular streamers to an exclusivity deal with YouTube, Twitch has previously lifted its own exclusivity deal that prevented big-earning streamers from streaming on competing services.
Eight years after its acquisition, Amazon still strikes the right balance between the sheer cost of streaming video over the Internet and the importance of celebrities, who bring the most attention and revenue to their service. I’m having trouble finding the . Much like movie stars, the famous creator is his main attraction on Twitch.
“I know they’ve got to make money somewhere, but this seems like a bad business decision,” he said, having almost 6 million followers and nearly 15,000 subscribers. Kaitlyn Siragusa, a Twitch streamer known as Amouranth who has nearly 15,000 subscribers, said… change. “They just make the platform less attractive to streamers.”
A Twitch spokesperson said executives were unable to discuss the status of this article.
As it rolls out this new revenue-sharing plan, the company has also faced issues with gambling on its service, including protests by some streamers against channels that promote gambling. announced On Tuesday, it announced it would ban streaming gambling sites containing unlicensed slots, roulette or dice games in the United States and certain other territories.
Between April and June, people watched 5.64 billion hours of streams across 9.6 million different channels on Twitch. data From StreamLabs, a streaming software company. His second most popular service on the internet, YouTube Gaming, has surpassed 1.13 billion hours.
But Google-owned YouTube wants more viewers. In the past year, he has signed three of his favorite Twitch streamers to exclusive deals.
A month after two of them left, Twitch announced it was lifting its ban. Now the company is cutting back on what it calls premium deals, contracts that give popular streamers more subscription revenue than other services.
These premium partners currently receive a 70% cut. In a blog post Wednesday, Twitch president Dan Clancy said he would continue to receive the cut for the first $100,000 he earned over a 12-month period, but after that he would receive 50%.
All other streamers on the platform will receive a 50% cut. Over a year ago, Twitch decided to stop offering premium deals and is working to bring existing deals in line with other services.
“I don’t think it’s right for someone with a standard contract to vary their revenue share based on streamer size,” Clancy said in a blog post. would be the same condition regardless of size.”
This change won’t go into effect until June 1st, and anyone with a premium contract won’t be able to see the cut change until their contract is renewed.
Twitch says the change was made at least in part because of the high cost of streaming video through its cloud service provider parent company Amazon.
Popular Twitch streamer Siragusa said she has already been in talks with other companies about the possibility of streaming, and that Twitch’s new revenue-sharing terms could get her even closer to making the move.
These new changes “could push us all to our limits,” she said in a phone interview.
Twitch president Clancy said in a blog post that popular streamers will be able to recoup lost revenue through the company’s advertising services, with the new program cutting 55% of the ad revenue streamers earn from their channels. I pointed out that However, Siragusa said this is far less attractive than collecting money through subscriptions.
“Advertising just pisses off viewers,” she said. “For Twitch it might be more profitable. But for us? It’s not ideal.”