Twitch’s New Branded Content Guidelines

Probably should also post Twitch's reply after backlash from the community:

https://twitter.com/Twitch/status/1666183145526538240

  Today’s branded content policy update was overly broad. This created confusion and frustration, and we apologize for that.

  We do not intend to limit streamers’ ability to enter into direct relationships with sponsors, and we understand that this is an important part of how streamers earn revenue.

  We wanted to clarify our existing ads policy that was intended to prohibit third party ad networks from selling burned in video and display ads on Twitch, which is consistent with other services.

  We missed the mark with the policy language and will rewrite the guidelines to be clearer. Thank you for sharing your concerns, and we appreciate the feedback. We’ll notify the community once we have updated the language.

It’s quite astonishing how consistently twitch seems to fumble the ball by fundamentally misunderstanding both streamers and viewers. It is like a restaurant run by aliens who don’t even understand why human beings eat food.

One prominent twitch steamer (MoistKritical)’s response pulls no punches https://youtu.be/-5zGuFPxW88

It’s crazy to me when you think about the sporting example. If you watch a sporting event there are billboards next to the field, there are ads on players’ clothes etc. The broadcaster doesn’t get to monopolise ad and sponsorship revenue.

I think twitch are wildly overplaying their hand here. It’s not like they have a great service that people will be reluctant to leave or replace. Twitch itself is basically horrible. The only reason to be there is if you like the content. If prominent streamers and events leave they have literally nothing.

While at it, they now forbid all streamers (not just partners) from simulcasting to other streamer services.

They force you to have their ads, but give you no revenue. Any source of revenue you manage to have gets hit by a 50:50 split, streamers can get banned anytime for vague reasons (like a vtuber showing too much "skin" e.g. vei (veibae) recently, but not equally enforced, particularly meat-based streamers tend to get a pass) and on top of that they want streamers to be captive on Twitch through these new measures against streaming to multiple sites.

It is an abusive relationship.

I hope this is the last "kick" streamers need to just move on to greener pastures.

It would be great if one of the larger corpos simply moved all its streamers, and this set a trend.