Twitch New Sponsorship System

The platform’s plans for a new sponsorship scheme have drawn criticism from Twitch streamers, who fear that Twitch will pocket a sizable portion of the profits.

Even though the majority of streamers now use Twitch as their preferred medium, they have had a lot of problems with the Amazon-owned service. Many of these criticisms have focused on Twitch taking a sizable portion of subscriber income, a significant increase in advertisements, among other things. As always, everything ultimately comes down to money. Naturally, some of the most popular streamers search for additional income sources outside of Twitch, frequently bringing in their own sponsors. Now that Twitch wishes to update their own sponsorship program, streamers are not too happy about it.

The Amazon-owned platform revealed on April 4 that sponsored streams, where sponsors can pay with gift subscriptions, are beginning to be tested and may be seen by watchers and streamers.

Given that Twitch already receives a portion of subscription fees, this naturally raised concerns because, if they were to serve as a middleman to negotiate sponsorship agreements, they might be taking a sizable portion of streamers’ revenue. Escape from Tarkov star Pestily said; “Whilst this may make things more streamlined for some people. It honestly sounds like you are just trying to take a cut from sponsored content.”

PaladinAmber replied; “No thanks, I like to manage my sponsorships and the income I personally derive from that work myself. cute idea though.” 

“Could you start testing a way to stop taking half of my income instead?” added Bearki. HJune, a Rust streamer, continued by saying that he was “honestly bummed” to see “no integrity” surrounding Twitch’s claims to boost creator compensation. ItmeJP remarked, “Sponsors paying via gifted subs sure sounds awful to me.”

It will be interesting to see how far the system progresses in its present configuration given that it is still only in the testing phase. However, it is pretty obvious that streamers are not too happy with the way things are going, particularly since Kick is encouraging users to switch platforms by offering higher sub splits.