Twitch Wants To Let More People Make Some Money From Livestreaming Video Games

Video, video, video. That’s basically all any and every platform wants to talk about, here in 2017: how much video it can stream, and how many people are watching it. But one step in getting people to watch live video on your platform is making sure the folks making those videos have an incentive to keep making them. There’s only so much people will do for their own amusement. So what better enticement than more money?

The latest video streaming platform to offer creators more cash is Amazon-owned Twitch, the livestreaming platform for gamers.

Until now, only the top 1% of Twitch streamers (roughly 20,000 of the 2.2 million folks broadcasting on Twitch) have been eligible to get paid for their time — or, in Twitch’s parlance, participate in the “partner program.”

So now, <a href="http://ift.tt/2p0oDyS to the Wall Street Journal, Twitch is going to be adding an “affiliate program” that’s open to a wider swath of folks. Starting next week, more broadcasters will be able to, basically, accept tips from viewers who drop “bits” into their channels for a penny apiece.

For a popular streamer who can reach a broad audience, the seemingly small change is no joke. Twitch tells the WSJ that its top earners clear $100,000 per year in revenue, and you can see why: the potential audience is huge.

In 2016, roughly 622,000 viewers were simultaneously watching streams at any given time. The current record for an individual well-known exports figure is about 245,000 concurrent viewers, and a major event can bring the site more than 2 million simultaneous watchers. And the top

As the WSJ points out, Twitch is making itself more attractive to potential streamers while other platforms continue to face challenges trying to rely on live-streamed content.

Last year, Twitter opened its video advertising program to all comers and offered content creators a 70%/30% split, better than the 45% of ad revenue YouTube offered. And YouTube, meanwhile, is still trying to reduce the money that stolen or copycat videos make and facing blowback from advertisers over the way ads have appeared with offensive videos and hate speech.