Twitch just added another path to become Partner. Will it let established streamers help up-and-comers?

Twitch‘s path to partnership is not an easy one. Any streamer who wants to become an official partner of the platform has to meet a strict set of requirements: Within one 30-day period, they have to stream on at least 12 different days, stream 25+ hours of content, and maintain an average of 75 viewers across all their live time.

That last requirement is the most difficult, since most streamers start out broadcasting to a couple friends at most, and with Twitch’s in-house discoverability features notoriously not great at helping creators grow, expanding from that initial pool of viewers can take a lot of time. Many streamers will not hit partner within their first 30 days of trying, and will have to spend several months or even years chasing that status—but it is worth chasing, since becoming partner means getting a bigger share of revenue from things like channel subscriptions, and having more control over channel customization and ad deployment.

Thanks to a new policy change at Twitch, however, some streamers may have an easier time making partner.

According to Angela, a member of Twitch’s Global Partner Operations Team, Twitch is now including raids in that average viewer count. Raids are one of Twitch’s core features, and allow streamers who are going offline to send their viewers en masse to another streamer’s channel. It’s a way for streamers to support one another, and introduce their own audiences to creators they enjoy. (It also, unfortunately, has a history of being weaponized, though Twitch says it’s implemented tools to keep hate raids from happening again.)

Historically, Twitch has not counted raid viewership toward streamers’ path to partnership. Angela says the decision to now count it stems from Twitch not wanting to “punish the idea of networking and communities.”

Twitch has been doubling down on creator community-building lately, introducing more features to its collab tool Stream Together, including one where streamers can ask to join each other’s broadcasts as co-presenters while they’re live. It also introduced merged chats for multi-creator streams, a feature that was so desperately wanted by streamers, it killed Squad Stream, Twitch’s first attempt at an in-house collab tool.

Allowing raid viewership to count toward partner clears the way for established streamers to make a major, tangible contribution toward up-and-comers’ careers. A streamer who has 40,000 viewers raiding a streamer who averages 10 could be a life-changing moment, if the smaller streamer is able to hang on to some of that audience.

Twitch tends to have a bit of a mentor culture: streamers we’ve spoken to often cite other creators as their reason for getting into this career, with many saying they wouldn’t have pursued streaming without direct encouragement and support from established streamers. This change lets those mentors contribute even more to their mentee streamers’ development.

We recognize, though, that it could also be ripe for abuse. Angela added that Twitch “definitely looks for real engagement as well” with raids, so it’s keeping an eye out for viewbotting. But there could be other ways to game the system, like bigger streamers surreptitiously charging fees to raid aspiring partners.

Despite that potential, this change seems like a net positive that could allow streamers to more meaningfully crowdsource (or, rather, crowd-provide) the kind of discoverability Twitch hasn’t yet figured out how to give them.