Twitch Wants Viewers To Pay To Advertise Their Favourite Streamers

Here are some of our favourite livestream wins and fails...

First of all, people are comparing this to "pay-to-win" mechanics. You pay money, you're more likely to "win" followers, subscribers, and valued members of your community. And though this is a feature designed with smaller streamers in mind, it does mean that those with dedicated audiences may have a huge advantage over those who are just starting out. This doesn't fix the discoverability issue for the smallest streamers.

Additionally, there would be a temptation for streamers to create throwaway accounts that spend the money to boost their stream. Again, this feels a little like a pay-to-win situation, but it could cause issues for desperate streamers who want to be seen by the masses, overspending with a chance it could make them famous. And as it is, Amazon takes a massive cut of the money that streamers make - affiliates are locked into a 50/50 split of subs for example. Paying money to Amazon to appear on the site to new people feels *off* to many.

Streamers of all sizes have already weighed in on the feature. Cohh Carnage, for example, says: "Initial thoughts on this: I can't even come up with the right words right now on how much I incredibly dislike this direction." Alanah Pearce responds by saying: "Discoverability on Twitch sucks. But I don't think paying Amazon is a solution for anyone but Amazon."

Negaoryx says: "I went to Twitch without being logged in & this is what the home page's recommendations were. not a single channel below 8k viewers. only one woman. Instead of asking community members to pay Twitch to promote us, why not have an algorithm that serves anyone other than the top 1%?"

Paladin Amber goes along a similar route with her tweet about the situation: "So it was free promotion for the top 1% of twitch but now the rest of us gotta pay to play lmaoooooooo twitch looking like a giant micro-transaction rn"

The issue here is that it feels like it exploits smaller streamers to more predatory practices. Small affiliates combined make Twitch a huge amount of money in all sorts of ways already, from subs to bits to ads. Adding on a new feature that perhaps gives them a chance at achieving their dreams if they spend enough money to be promoted to people feels like it could have terrible side effects on small streamers as a whole.

However, as we said, this is still in the test stages. There could be changes made to the system before it becomes a regular part of the Twitch ecosystem, and it might not even come to Twitch at all if it's unpopular enough.