Twitch’s New Features Encourage Streamers On Their Path To Partnership Status
Twitch kicked off its annual TwitchCon by informing its creative community about a host of new features coming over the horizon. During a keynote hosted by Director of Programming Marcus “djWHEAT” Graham (pictured above) and headlined by CEO Emmett Shear, the streaming service announced a number of tools, several of which will assist streamers as they look to earn Affiliate or Partner status.
Both Twitch Affiliates and Twitch Partners gain access to several valuable perks. Members of the latter group, for example, are able to offer lucrative subscriptions to their fans. During its keynote address, Twitch noted that the amount of money it has paid out to Partners has doubled over the past year.
The Affiliate and Partner tiers, however, require entrants to achieve certain viewership benchmarks, and three new Twitch features, all of which will debut in November, will help aspiring creators on the path toward those goals. A “Stream Summary” will share data from individual broadcasts with streamers. As those numbers pile up, Twitch users will unlock Achievements, which will provide positive reinforcement on the road to Partnership. Up-and-comers can also receive boosts from their fellows in the Twitch community thanks to b, which will harness the power of Twitch chat to point viewers toward whatever channel the active streamer wishes to recommend.
Here, via a press release are details about the other updates Twitch discussed during its address:
Rituals: Rituals make it easier for creators to celebrate special moments that bring their community together. The initial Ritual enables creators to signal to their community in chat that a visitor is new to the channel and to welcome them. Timing: November, 2017.
Premieres: Premieres allow creators to maximize the excitement, anticipation, and viewership around new uploaded content by creating live first-viewing events. Similar to how people gather around the TV for the debut of a favorite show, fans can now do the same virtually for a creator’s new uploaded content. Creators can watch along with their community to provide insights, commentary, or just enjoy the show with their community. Timing: Q4 2017
Rooms: With Rooms, creators can develop smaller, parallel chat groups for users with shared interests, including moderators, subscribers, followers, and other community members. Timing: Q4 2017
Subscription gifting: Subscription Gifting allows anyone to gift 1-month subscriptions to any streamer’s channel to anyone on Twitch. Timing: Pre-holiday, Q4 2017
In-Extension purchases: Enables partners and affiliates to earn revenue from developer-created digital items that viewers buy within Extensions. Timing: Beta in November, 2017
The following milestones were also announced:
Twitch’s commitment to building the most means of monetization for creators has resulted in a massive year-over-year increase in revenue. In 2017, more than double the amount of money was paid to individual Partners with 71% more money generated on average.
Twitch Prime, which was announced at TwitchCon 2016, has been a huge success, bringing in 50% more subscriptions for streamers. That works out to one new sub every four seconds.
Representing one of the most successful discovery features Twitch has launched is Clips, which are up to 60 second snippets of video. There have been more than 1 billion views of Clips on Twitch since launch, including over 2.4 million views for the most-watched Clip of all time by JurassicJunkie.
Earlier this year, Twitch expanded monetization support to tens of thousands of non-partnered streamers with the Twitch Affiliates Program. Within six months after its launch, over 110,000 creators have joined the program.
To ensure the best quality of service, video delay has been reduced an average of 60%.
AutoMod, the machine-based learning chatbot that ensures creators can effectively mitigate inappropriate behavior in chat, currently scans over 320 million chat messages a month.
Twitch Extensions are a new set of tools that allow developers to help creators customize their channel pages with interactive experiences. They’re flexible, dynamic, easy to build, and easy to use. In the six weeks since launch, streamers have shared their extensions with over 15 million viewers, and more than 1100 developers have registered to create an Extension.