Tuesday, when they banned at least some forms of gambling and gambling partnerships on their platform, Twitch was trying to get a win. But it was clear that it was a sign of bad news to come on Wednesday when they said that their highest-earning streamers would be getting pay cuts and that smaller streamers wouldn't see any changes.
Twitch announced on Wednesday that "premium" creators who had a 70/30 subscription split in their favor will now have that split capped after the first $100,000 they earn. After that, the split will change to 50/50, which is how most "normal" Twitch streamers get their money. The changes won't happen until June 1, 2023, and they won't change any contracts that are already in place with Twitch.
Twitch tries to explain this by saying that ad revenue splits are getting better, but even if this only affects the best streamers, here's why everyone is mad:
These top-tier streamers feel like they contributed to Twitch's success, which Twitch admits in its blog post. The cuts could push them away from Twitch and toward a competitor like YouTube, which has a 70/30 split when their contracts are up.
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Normal streamers who aren't stars had hoped that the opposite would happen, that the 50/50 split would be changed to 70/30 for everyone. "Taxing" the most successful creators doesn't help them since nothing major changes for them in a good way.
Everyone is upset about this new focus on ads since ads drive away viewers and have been getting more common and annoying on Twitch recently. No one wants to spend more time showing ads to their viewers.
Throughout all of this, people are constantly reminded that Amazon, a trillion-dollar megacorporation, owns Twitch, which makes these cuts seem pointless even though it's clear that Twitch needs to make more money on its own and can't just rely on Amazon to keep it going.
As the streaming market share leader, Twitch may still be able to control these changes. It says it wants to do this because of the costs of hosting videos, but it's hard to know what the long-term effects might be. If YouTube keeps its 70/30 split, it's likely that more and more people will move in that direction, even though there aren't that many competitors in the space overall since Mixer shut down, and Facebook Gaming has a hard time keeping up with Twitch and YouTube.
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It does seem like every new announcement and change from Twitch is for the worse, so it's not surprising that many people are fed up with their policies. The news is never good, and as I write this, Bloomberg just released a long report about how child predators have been using Twitch to track kids.
Many of the Twitch streamers who will be most affected by the new split are probably still under contract, so we may have to wait a while to find out how many of them will leave. But it's not clear how far Twitch can push its audience, and it's also not clear if a competitor like YouTube will also leave its 70/30 split alone forever.
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