In many ways, wanting to grow up to be a streamer, YouTuber, or ‘content creator’ is the new wanting to be a Hollywood actor. Instead of watching telly and wanting to be the next Zac Efron, kids surf YouTube channels or Twitch streams and want to be the next Félix ‘xQc’ Lengyel.
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However, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for small streamers to find success. Twitch is notorious for its strict terms of service, which prevents streamers from multi-casting (streaming on multiple platforms simultaneously), and its tight 50/50 revenue split, meaning that only half of the money you pledge to streamers goes directly to them, with Amazon pocketing the other 50 percent. While the corporation obviously has running costs and staff to pay, this is an excessive distribution model that saw many creators swap platforms to those with more favourable revenue splits.
Twitch’snew limitationscrack down hard on this sort of advertising. You cannot have “burned in” adverts, which means no on-screen banners or video breaks, and no audio ads either. It’s unclear as to whether this affects alerts or on-screen fundraising thermometers, but it applies to charity streams as much as everyday livestreams. As part of this new policy, the only allowable ads – other than those that Twitch inserts into streams itself – must take up no more than three percent of screen space on overlays.
Twitch is losing a lot of goodwill – to the point where it has had to issue anapology, saying, “We missed the mark with the policy language and will rewrite the guidelines to be clearer,” which means very little – and creators on the platform are losing patience. This is the latest anti-worker change in a long line of similar anti-worker changes. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, but streamers need to unionise and fight for their rights.
Just like an Uber driver or an Amazon warehouse employee, Twitch streamers are freelance workers, a precarious profession at the best of times, being shafted out of earning any extra revenue to boost their business. In such a time of increased financial hardship for everybody (bar those most profiting from Twitch’s new policies), Twitch owes them respect, and it owes them fair pay, too.
