You’ve probably heard of Twitch, the popular live-streaming platform. This is a place where creators can broadcast themselves to the world, with people tuning in to watch. Some creators have made it their full-time job, earning an entire living on the platform.
But now, the way Twitch creators earn their money will be changing. The streaming platform will be sharing ad revenue with creators through its Ads Incentive Program, which should theoretically earn the creators more money from the ad pot.
Twitching to keep creators
The Ads Incentive Program was launched a couple months back, to help creators manage ad income. Since then, Twitch has listened to community feedback and made a few changes.
“The premise of the Ads Incentive program (AIP) is simple: each month a creator gets an offer. If they stream for a specific amount of hours in that month with a specific ad-density, they’ll receive a predetermined payout. Let the Ads Manager handle the ads and at the end of the month you get paid,” says Twitch in a blog post.
Twitch wants to make this better for creators and will be making a switch from a CPM (Cost Per Mile) model – which gives creators money every 1,000 ad views. Rather than the CPM model, it will be switching it to a percentage-based share. This means that for every ad that runs on a creators channel, they will receive 55% of the revenue.
“Payment will be made on a net basis, meaning revenue less (a) billing and other costs and fees paid to provide the Twitch Services; and (b) taxes, returns, refunds, chargebacks, discounts and credits.”
This seems like a reasonable trade-off for creators.
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Twitch affiliates aren’t being left out in the cold either. In August, the platform will be posting a further update about the 55% ad-share revenue for those affiliate channels.
“We won’t pay any Creator less ad money for opting into the Ads Incentive Program. If it turns out your AIP offer payout is lower than what you would have earned running ads outside of the program, we’ll pay you the higher amount,” Twitch said.
Hopefully these solutions will be good enough for the creators who make their living on Twitch. Over the past year, creators have been complaining publicly about the fact that Twitch doesn’t share revenue fairly. This meant Twitch creators were forced to live-stream more to earn the money they felt was fair to them.
Whether these changes will be taken well by the Twitch community remains to be seen. It’s possible that Twitch has smoothed over the angry complaints and has implemented a solution to fix the issue. Or… creators could be seeing even less money for their effort. If this is the case, Twitch could potentially lose their biggest creator names to its biggest competitor, YouTube.
Source: The Verge