Twitch is Cutting How Much Its Biggest Streamers Earn From Subscriptions (theverge.com) 68
Twitch is reducing how much money it shares with some of the biggest streamers on the platform. From a report: Right now, the majority of partnered streamers receive a 50 / 50 revenue share on subscriptions to their channel. That means 50 percent of net revenue goes to Twitch, while 50 percent goes to the streamer themselves. However, Twitch has negotiated premium subscription terms with some bigger streamers that give them a 70 / 30 revenue split, and that split is what's going to change.
Under the new policy, streamers with premium terms will keep 70 percent of their subscription revenue on the first $100,000 earned. But after that, the share will go down to a 50 / 50 split. The changes kick into effect on June 1st, 2023, and even then only when a streamer's contract with Twitch is up for renewal, according to a blog post from Twitch president Dan Clancy.
Under the new policy, streamers with premium terms will keep 70 percent of their subscription revenue on the first $100,000 earned. But after that, the share will go down to a 50 / 50 split. The changes kick into effect on June 1st, 2023, and even then only when a streamer's contract with Twitch is up for renewal, according to a blog post from Twitch president Dan Clancy.
Exodus (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Exodus (Score:4)
Going to some site where I get 5% as many views than I would on Twitch doesn't make up the lost revenue. Twitch knows this and it will impact any big streamer that doesn't have their own powerful brand (EA, Valve, etc).
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I'd guess that anyone who can make 100k a year from Twitch already HAS their own brand, and following. If you can tell them "and we'll continue over there and cut 20% of the cost, and for everyone you bring along you save another 5%", they should easily recover that.
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i dont think your imaginary platform exists as competition to twitch.
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Rewind several years...
Youtube is king. I don't think switching to this new Twitch platform will work for content creators because they will lose a large chunk of their audience.
Rinse repeat...
Re:Exodus (Score:5, Informative)
YouTube and Twitch are entirely different markets and a lot of Twitch streamers also post edited videos of their streams to YouTube.
In fact, YouTube did attempt to compete with Twitch for streaming for a while, they called it "YouTube Gaming" and eventually gave up and closed it down when it became clear they weren't really pulling anyone away from Twitch. (And, yes, YouTube still supports streaming video. They're just not aiming it at the Twitch audience any more.)
Twitch is pretty much a monopoly for its very specific segment, namely, streaming video of video games. In much the same way YouTube failed to enter Twitch's market, Twitch has tried to enter the streaming market for other content (I think there are some sports games there and because they're both owned by Amazon there's a Washington Post news stream), and ultimately failed at that as well.
And no, I don't think it will last forever, and Twitch has had real competitors before. It's just that right now, the large tech companies that are capable of competing appear to be happy just staying in their own lanes, doing the very careful not-technically-colluding dance of avoiding competing with each other to maintain monopoly power.
Google isn't a large tech company? (Score:2)
You pointed out that YouTube / Google tried going after Twitch's market, and failed. That market being live streaming of gaming and some other things. When all the creators of a certain type of content are on platform X, all the consumers are there too, and there's almost nothing that can that.
Just as they've tried multiple times to compete with Facebook, etc.
After pointing out they've tried to compete, and in fact Google alone has spent BILLIONS of dollars trying to get into their competitors markets - th
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In fact, YouTube did attempt to compete with Twitch for streaming for a while, they called it "YouTube Gaming" and eventually gave up and closed it down when it became clear they weren't really pulling anyone away from Twitch. (And, yes, YouTube still supports streaming video. They're just not aiming it at the Twitch audience any more.)
Yea, this isn't true. Youtube is paying out big bucks to pull over large streamers from Twitch. They have not given up on that market yet.
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i dont think your imaginary platform exists as competition to twitch.
Facebook Gaming?
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only 100k a year from Twitch means you don't have a significant brand. Sorry. That's not enough money to live on once you cover business expenses.
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What type of business expenses could these people possibly be racking up that $100k a year income couldnt handle? I'll admit I don't use Twitch at all but from what I've seen through other channels they don't seem to be expensive productions at all.
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$100K is not the net income, it used to be $70K, and will be $50K, which is not a lot” by any means. It means "well-off" in many 3rd world countries (e.g. Eastern Europe).
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It will still be $70K. They just drop to 50% of revenue on proceeds ABOVE $100K. So if you bring in $110k, you earn $70K on the first $100K and then $5K for the remaining for a total of $75K.
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I stand corrected. However, they have to pay taxes on that income as well, don't they? After Twitch takes their cut?
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Yes. Just like any $70K form of employment. Except for an additional self employment tax (in the US) since it would be on a 1099.
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$70k is a lot when all you do is sit in your parents basement and play video games or make blowjob sounds in a mic.
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Yeah, well, see, that shows you have no clue what you are talking about.
In many ways, a successful streamer works harder and burns out faster than someone with a regular job.
1. They must post videos daily, or even multiple times a day, every day.
2. Their schedule is tight: stream the newest hyped game (or game update) one day or even a few hours later than everyone else and it's all but guaranteed you will lose 90% of viewers, who'll get their fix elsewhere.
3. Talent and hard work is required to play a game
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Outside of California and a small number of other states 50k a year is not that bad of an income and one should have the excess income to buy a decent computer at that point if one isnt stupid with money.
Of course as others have pointed out it would be 70k on that first 100k earned so kind of a moot point.
Re: Exodus (Score:2)
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recording equipment, promotion, accountant (for taxes at the very least), and probably at least one part-time employee unless you want to drive yourself insane during live streams. If you see a video and the person is either playing a game or looking at the camera, then you can be sure they have someone sitting on the comments section at the very least.
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I feel like you're claiming more modest streamers run with the same expenses as the super successful ones and while I cant find proper info one way or another on a casual google search I strongly doubt that.
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You absolutely can run a modest stream. For fun or a little side cash. You're not going to make $100K though. And if you did, the competition is such that to have the production quality to sustain that you're not likely to have enough left over if stream alone is your revenue source.
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That's not what I'm getting at. I would suggest for instance that someone making 70k a year from streaming (after Twitter takes their cut from 100k) isnt going to have employees.
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They aren't making that much in practice. But let's say hypothetically a single person streamer is making that. They still have to spend some portion of that 70k on promotion and equipment. $2K on cameras, audio, and lights would be do able for entry level. $20K on promotion is not unusual and probably necessary to get enough viewers to sustain that level of income long-term. We'll pretend they do their own accounting and own taxes.
Sounds great, $45K or so to live on. Streaming out of a two bedroom apartmen
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Again, (outside of the one off hardware expenses which shouldnt be that bad given what you can do with cheap hardware nowadays) I don't think your costs are realistic for the level they're operating at.
Wish I could find some proper data on this but no such luck.
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Good luck with your business. Your expectations are different than my own experiences.
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So you're a Twitch streamer then? Or are you claiming expertise on something you don't know anything about?
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only 100k a year from Twitch means you don't have a significant brand. Sorry. That's not enough money to live on once you cover business expenses.
Most business owners are considering net revenue AFTER business expenses.
Though to a large degree "business expenses" for Twitch streamers are rather minimal and often times overlap with stuff they'd buy anyways.
You need a good gaming PC - most gamers already are going to have one. You need broadband internet - everyone has that.
You need an encoding PC - $400 will do you there and it will last for quite a few years. Lighting, microphones, cameras, etc other streaming gear around $2-3k and again it'll last
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I seriously doubt the average person streaming is even pulling down 34k a year. A few big names likely suck up most the proverbial oxygen and rake in the majority of the money.
Still, if you enjoy playing a video game and giving commentary on whatever they talk about, it doesn't seem like much barrier to entry and you make a few dollars and that's okay.
I don't really get sitting around watching other people play video games. Maybe for 5 minutes, then you move on to playing whatever game you want. Different g
Re:Exodus (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd guess that anyone who can make 100k a year from Twitch already HAS their own brand, and following. If you can tell them "and we'll continue over there and cut 20% of the cost, and for everyone you bring along you save another 5%", they should easily recover that.
Tell that to Microsoft.
They tried it before. Remember Mixer? It was a Twitch competitor that Microsoft bought and integrated with Xbox. It supported low-latency streaming to improve audience interaction and I think supported higher resolutions and bitrates than Twitch does even today.
They paid several major Twitch streamers tens of millions of dollars to move to Mixer. Forget any complicated revenue sharing scheme, just an up-front cash payment. And it didn't work. Microsoft shut Mixer down less than a year later. (Personally, and I've said this before, I think Microsoft gave up too easily. I think if Microsoft had been willing to stick it out and keep Mixer running for the long haul, they could have had a viable second place competitor. But Microsoft didn't want second, they wanted first, and when it became clear they'd never beat Twitch outright, they quit.)
The problem is that Twitch isn't just a streaming platform. It's not like Netflix vs. Disney+ where you can just switch depending on where the content you want to watch is. It's an entire social networking platform onto itself. It even has its own shibboleths like "poggers" and "pogchamp." (No, I don't understand what they mean, I tend to avoid Twitch because quite honestly it's terrible.) Streamers will "raid" other streamers which builds networks of streamers who share subscribers. There are shared emotes and "tipping" using a Twitch currency and all this stuff that's designed to keep people within the Twitch ecosystem.
Which means that, ultimately, no, you can't just switch to a new platform. You'll lose out on network effects, and people may simply opt to not follow, because of all the various things that are designed to keep people within Twitch itself. I don't know that Microsoft ever published figures to let us know how bad the audience drop-off was when streamers moved to Mixer from Twitch, but I believe the rumor was only 20% of viewers continued to watch on Mixer.
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The little conspiracy person in my head says that they bought Beam-turned-Mixer solely to have control of the low-latency streaming tech you talk about; whether Mixer lived or died was secondary, it was all about having and controlling that which they could use in all of their other streaming/video conferencing software. Sure, they might have lost a few million (or even billion, I can't quickly find the purchase price and subsequent write-off), but the final loss was a p
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Actually it is interesting if after twitch came youtube .. what's the next big that will come after twitch?
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Apparently nothing. Whatever is cool and new today is cemented in the closed minded... /s
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The previous story about Twitch (two or three back on the front page) mentioned that some of the biggest streamers have threatened a boycott in Christmas week. The implication was that they were boycotting in protest about the new gambling stream policy. It seems much more likely that this policy change is what they're complaining about.
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Isn't this just going to motivate some bigger streamers to find a better venue for their content? At the very least, this looks like the perfect scenario for competition to gain a better foothold in the streaming market.
Possibly, though what's the alternative?
A lot of these services are natural monopolies in the sense that 90%+ of the traffic goes to the main one and virtually nothing to the rest. There's different styles of streaming (live YouTube, TikTok) but I don't know if someone can effectively transition from one platform to another. If your career is as a Twitch Streamer then you live and die by the whims of Twitch.
It seems like podcasting is the one monetizeable category of individual generated content that isn't
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The problem is a lack of viable alternatives. Same with youtube. Both platforms would probably be in decline if there were better alternatives. A clear market failure and a clear failure on the side of the regulators.
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Some high profile streamers jumped to Mixer a while back when that was a going concern. MS made a big show of signing cushy exclusivity contracts with them. The streamers lost audience in droves. Turns out that most people are more loyal to the platform than any particular person on it.
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That's a bit like saying that Microsoft news is only news for nerds with Microsoft stock.
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the free market will help ? (Score:3)
Clearly Twitch is trying to squeeze them for more money just because they can. I find it hard to believe that their operating costs are such that they need to do this for expenses. So this is a wall street related play. i don't even know if they're public, but either they are and the shareholders are yelling at them, or they want to be, and they gotta make the books look good.
regardless, this is a situation where the talent is everything and the infrastructure is not.
I find it very hard to believe another service to host the streamers couldn' show up to give the big streamers a better deal. Hard to know if it would really be worthwhile for that company. another interesting idea, a streamer co-op ?
Meanwhile Twitch has them trapped. After this works and they start making more money , it will be interesting to see how much they keep whittling down the percentages.
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." So this is a wall street related play. i don't even know if they're public, but either they are and the shareholders are yelling at them, or they want to be, and they gotta make the books look good"
Twitch is owned by Amazon. so yeah, it's amazon being amazon.
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Clearly Twitch is trying to squeeze them for more money just because they can. I find it hard to believe that their operating costs are such that they need to do this for expenses.
Have you not noticed energy prices have absolutely sky-rocketed globally in the past year or so?
Have you not noticed that because of that, *all* other costs have also risen dramatically?
It's called "Inflation," and it's global, and it's real, and it's gonna get much worse than it is now before it gets better.
And of course, all the suppliers are gonna take it out on their customers, who in turn will take it out on their customers, and so forth, until it hits you and me -- which it already is.
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Clearly Twitch is trying to squeeze them for more money just because they can. I find it hard to believe that their operating costs are such that they need to do this for expenses. So this is a wall street related play. i don't even know if they're public, but either they are and the shareholders are yelling at them, or they want to be, and they gotta make the books look good.
No, they are squeezing them because they have to. Twitch has been missing their revenue targets set by Amazon for a while now, and it's becoming more and more apparent that Amazon is turning up the heat on Twitch leadership to get in line or else. Meanwhile yes, their operating expensive are quite high. A world-wide CDN with expensive video ingest and real-time re-encoding infrastructure is not cheap. Their revenue sources are subscriptions for partner/affiliate streamers, bits purchased to give to streamer
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Clearly Twitch is trying to squeeze them for more money just because they can.
Funny I read this the opposite way. The best streamers were able to negotiate a better rate than common folk and Twitch is simply trying to balance it back to normal.
Thanks for explaining (Score:2)
What a 50/50 split is
Sigh
Business. (Score:2)
So a business thing happened between business partners. There's no controversy. No guns are being held to anyone's heads.
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Twitch handles live video. That requires pretty hefty infrastructure.
You could spin up your own WhatsApp in your basement and run it on a shoestring, but you're not going to do that with your own Twitch.
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Also, Twitch is owned by Amazon who has *all the infrastructure you can imagine you'd ever need* at little to no cost to their subsidiary company.
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That will cover your audience of 3 people who don't care about 4k/60 fps. Clearly Twitch better watch their back!
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A vast majority of people don't have the bandwidth or data allowance to watch at those qualities. A vast majority of streamers don't have the upstream bandwidth to stream at that rate successfully.
If the only stream you care about is sad basic bitches shaking their tits in hot tubs like Amouranth maybe you'd have a point, but most streamers don't stream or watch at those rates. Their content is about... the content.
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You seem upset.
It would be difficult and expensive, probably prohibitively so, for someone to set up enough equipment and connectivity to stream to a meaningful audience. Lots of people can absolutely receive 4k 60 fps streams. 4k monitors cost about $300. A streamer who's going to make a living at it needs to routinely have an audience of a couple thousand. Your little anecdote about your raspberry pi, and your belief that nobody can watch 4k video just shows how out of touch you are.
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I can easily set up a service to stream to a couple hundred people without the need for Twitch or YouTube. So could you if you bothered to look at how it's done. My 'anecdote' about the raspberry pi is showing that a sub-GHz machine with minimal RAM costing $40 can adequately provide 3-4 viewers with a stream. If you weren't as dumb as a fucking hammer you'd know that for ~$150 you can set up a high-performance, high-bandwidth clo
Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! (Score:1)
So, they're punishing rather than rewarding their biggest revenue generators... Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!
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The top streamers likely have a significant portion of their revenues coming from sources other than Twitch anyway.
I guess it sucks for them but probably not a significant change for all but a few streamers.
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All the "content creators" are going to make videos bitching about this...which is, in itself, "content"...and for which they will be paid.
Twitch really does have a better hand in this game...there aren't any great alternatives. There are plenty of content creating fish in the sea...and there are always more clamoring to become "creators".
IDGAF...I don't watch Twitch...but it's mildly interesting from a business perspective.