The German opinion streamer Staiy often discusses current topics and other content creators. Now he has taken on Twitch itself and draws a pretty devastating conclusion, as Twitch mainly revolves around advertising.
What kind of streamer is this? Staiy has been on Twitch since 2013 and is therefore very familiar with the platform. During this time, he has built a considerable community and is currently ranked 20th among the largest German-speaking streamers with over 5,000 viewers (via sullygnome).
Although the Swiss national makes part of his living from Twitch, he does not mince words when it comes to criticizing the platform.
What has Staiy looked at now? On January 25, Twitch published an “open letter” to the community. In the post, Twitch reflected on 2022 and provided an outlook on the changes that are to be introduced in 2023.
However, it seems that the Amazon platform is primarily concerned with one thing: plenty of advertising.
In 2022, Twitch went from very bad to bad
How did the past year go? First, Staiy mentions that streamers reportedly earned more than one billion US dollars in 2022 according to Twitch. Although that sounds like a lot of money at first, with 7.3 million active streamers, that means only about $137 in annual revenue per person.
Since large streamers earn significantly more than $137 a year, this implies that many small streamers have hardly earned anything at all: “Don’t be blinded by these numbers,” Staiy urges.
At least Twitch has made some concessions to small streamers by lowering the minimum payout amount to $50 in 2022. Thus, 300,000 streamers would have received their first payout. Staiy immediately puts this into perspective:
That’s good, but it’s still bad. So, it’s something good, but it makes it go from something very bad to something bad, if you understand what I mean.
After all, this would only show that many streamers had not generated enough money until that point to withdraw any funds – and for that long, Twitch simply keeps the money.
Little money for a lot of advertising
What other changes were there in 2022? According to Staiy, some changes are actually not changes at all. For example, the “Guest Star” system introduced by Twitch, which is supposed to protect streamers from penalties if a guest misbehaves during their streams, has actually changed nothing.
Other innovations are viewed rather critically by the streamer: individually customizable tags could especially lead to harassment by malicious viewers, especially when streaming with an LGBTQ tag.
Tools for analyzing one’s own content are indeed useful, but they could also become a mental burden for streamers if they focus too much on their viewer statistics.
There was also criticism of the reward program for advertisements. Twitch claims that streamers would achieve convincing results through this, but Staiy sees it differently. He shows what offers he received from Twitch for the month of February.
The result: For 2 hours of advertising per month, the streamer would receive $564, thus working “far below minimum wage”. For double the amount of advertising, there is just $63 more. This is exploitation, according to Staiy.
Ironically, he would earn more money if he did not run any ads at all and only showed the ads forced by Twitch. As long as Twitch runs ads in such a “disgusting manner”, he would therefore promote ad-blockers, according to the streamer.
Because ad-blockers are the only way to give the platform the middle finger, says Staiy.
The entire detailed analysis has been uploaded by Staiy to his YouTube account. You can watch it here:
Will Twitch make the turnaround in 2023?
What is planned for 2023? For this year, Twitch has set itself several goals. It’s all about advertising three times: streamers should be able to advertise their streams better, switch ads more easily, and the placement of ads in the stream should be improved.
These are the things Twitch has announced for 2023:
- More ways to earn money
- New tools for stream advertising
- Easier and better ad placement
- Improved ad placement on Twitch
- Improvements to Guest Star
- Tools for “viewer appreciation”
- Better insights and analysis for streamers
- A dedicated messaging product for interaction with the community
- Better ways for viewers to discover content
What does Staiy think of it? Overall, not much. Some changes are not really new, or should have been implemented a long time ago. The streamer also has the impression that Twitch keeps repeating itself in the individual points; apparently, they didn’t really know what else to write.
The focus of the innovations is on earning more money and increasing advertising. However, Staiy positively highlights a long-awaited change: a picture-in-picture format for advertising is to be introduced, allowing the stream to be watched even while ads are running.
In addition, viewers should be better informed when an ad break is coming, and ads should be able to be paused.
A change that Twitch does not mention, but that Staiy has noticed, relates to the handling of inappropriate behavior. Since mid-2022, hardly anything said on Twitch has serious consequences.
He has seen hateful comments from right-wing extremists and conspiracy theorists for which Twitch has not imposed any ban. The streamer also criticizes that the platform has not drawn any consequences from the notorious gamescom brawl involving 3 larger creators .
Conclusion: a complete disaster
This is Staiy’s conclusion: The streamer has some pretty harsh words for Twitch after he has dealt comprehensively with the blog post, which he considers “a complete disaster”: “I am so disappointed by so many things.”
While Staiy still holds hope that those responsible will critically question some issues, it is more likely that the future on Twitch will revolve around the keywords that keep recurring in the post: advertising.
Staiy feels particularly sorry for the viewers. If he could, he would gladly forgo the advertising revenue and provide his viewers with a completely ad-free experience.
