Twitch promises streamers higher revenues

Streaming is booming as a business model. But competition in the popular market is increasing. Twitch is now reacting to this and wants to improve the income situation of its streamers.

Adds Incentive Program: Opening and Changes

Monetization takes place on Twitch via the so-called Adds Incentive Program. Selected streamers are included in this program, which gives them the opportunity to capitalize on their activity by displaying advertisements. Specifically, it is an agreement that obliges the streamers in question to stream a certain number of hours of advertising each month. For this, they receive a pre-determined flat fee. Twitch has now announced that it will open up this program to more people. However, it is unclear how many people who are active on Twitch will benefit from this opening and what criteria Twitch will apply for inclusion in the future.

In addition, the way the monetization of Twitch streams works is to be fundamentally changed. The flat-rate system described so far is to be replaced by a differentiated remuneration strategy. Twitch has announced a revenue share instead: Those who participate in the program will receive 55 percent of the revenue generated by their videos in the future. Twitch assumes that the new model will mean a revenue increase of 50 to 100 percent for streamers. If revenues fall as a result of the model change, Twitch intends to apply the old calculation basis so that no one suffers a financial disadvantage as a result of the change.

Changes for affiliates

In addition to this monterarization option, there is also the option to earn money via affiliate links. Here, too, Twitch will pay out a revenue share of 55 percent in the future. The prerequisite for this is that advertising is displayed for at least three minutes per hour. This setting can be made in the Ads Manager.

The change to the affiliate program also means that the unpopular pre-roll ads will no longer be shown. In videos that contain at least three minutes of advertising per broadcast hour, these pre-roll ads will no longer be shown. Twitch therefore sees the announced changes not only as a service for streamers, but also for customers. The strong advertising orientation of the streaming service will thus nevertheless remain in place overall. In the past, Twitch had already impressively shown its prioritization here: Whoever uses an adblocker has to accept a much lower video quality.

Changes in the offer?

It will be interesting to wait and see how Steam’s streaming offering develops. Streamers will be more directly dependent on the revenue generated by their videos in the future than they have been in the past. It is therefore quite conceivable that particularly revenue-generating formats will increase, whereas those that are popular but do not lead to significant advertising revenue could disappear from the streamers’ focus.

The streaming service is already attractive for many streamers: as part of a leak at Twitch, it became known last year that the world’s most successful channel turned over around $9.6 million in a period of 27 months, which corresponds to around $4.2 million per year. The most successful German channel took in around 2.3 million US dollars during this period, which is still just over one million per year. According to its own data, Twitch paid out a total of one billion US dollars last year.