As Twitch is potentially dealing with its own adpocalypse, CEO Dan Clancy just confirmed some streamers are earning less revenue because brands don’t want their ads running next to content that’s been flagged as political or related to other “sensitive social topics.”
AT&T, JPMorgan Chase, and Dunkin’ have all pulled ads from Twitch in recent weeks, and Chevron is considering joining them, according to a report from Bloomberg. Their pull follows reports last month that 11 “significant” advertisers had paused spend on Twitch.
Advertiser concerns are coming from accusations of antisemitism spearheaded by Destiny, a streamer who was permabanned from Twitch in 2022 for hate speech, and Dan Saltman, another streamer Twitch banned for “extreme harassment” last month.
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Over the last couple of months, both Destiny and Saltman have repeatedly accused Twitch of enabling antisemitic content, pointing to Hasan Piker and his support for Palestine as an example of content that targets Jewish people. Bonnell has made numerous statements criticizing Piker and Twitch, and Saltman led a mass email campaign that has reportedly reached out to more than 100 advertisers who place marketing on Twitch, urging them to pull their ad dollars.
Piker told Bloomberg he is “an advocate for Palestinian emancipation, but also, a fervent combatter of antisemitism.” And the Anti-Defamation League, a pro-Israel advocacy group, consulted with Twitch amidst these accusations and gave it a B rating for combating antisemitic content—the highest rating it’s given to any social media platform.
Twitch itself told Bloomberg, “Despite what a handful of online personalities claim, we do not tolerate antisemitism on Twitch.”
But the ADL’s rating and Twitch’s reassurance apparently haven’t mollified some advertisers—and some streamers are feeling the financial effects of this increased scrutiny on political content.
Dan Clancy says there’s no adpocalypse
Last month, to address the then-upcoming U.S. presidential election and presumably some of the accusations around antisemitic content, Twitch introduced new content labels where creators who discuss “sensitive social issues” like “like gender, race, sexuality, or religion” in a “polarizing or inflammatory manner.”
Like many new Twitch policies do upon release, the labels received immediate backlash from streamers and viewers, but stayed on the platform, with Twitch requiring streamers to use them unless they were discussing topics like the war in Gaza in a “neutral, fact-based manner.”
Some streamers who used the labels said they immediately saw a drop in ad revenue. Creator/game developer PirateSoftware collected some of these complaints, but denied there was an adpocalypse in progress, tweeting that streamers who used the new labels to indicate “sexual or political themes […] stopped getting ad-fill.”
“An adpocalypse would denote that this is happening to everyone on the platform,” he wrote. “It’s not. Our income is exactly the same for this time of year as it ever has been. Don’t have political or sexual content on your stream, category, or tags and nothing changes.”
There is no Twitch Adpocalypse.
The reason people are seeing no ad revenue for the “last two days” is because none of us ever have. Twitch calculates ad revenue for a stream 3-4 days later which has always been the case. It shows as no ad revenue until that calculation is done.…
— Pirate Software (@PirateSoftware) November 19, 2024
Clancy used time in Twitch’s Dec. 4 Patch Notes stream to confirm that streamers who use the new political/sensitive social issue labels are seeing revenue drops.
“For a period of time, there were a number [of advertisers] that were expressing concerns around being shown up near sensitive subjects in politics, and so we had reduced the ads there,” he said. “Some people that were doing stuff around politics and sensitive social issues may have seen a reduction, because some advertisers weren’t running ads there.”
He mentioned PirateSoftware’s comments, and said he similarly does not believe an adpocalypse is on the horizon for Twitch.
🚨Twitch CEO Dan Clancy and MerryKish speak on Twitch streamers seeing a reduction in their Twitch Ad Revenue after Dan claimed streamers would make more money off Ads During Q4❗️🤦🏾♂️ pic.twitter.com/Z7YcQLja16
— Bestfriend (@BestfriendKick) December 4, 2024
Twitch’s Director of Community Marketing, Mary Kish, added that claims of an adpocalypse are “misinformation” and that “we’ve seen a lot of creators not experience anything.”
But Twitch beginning to lose ad rev from companies like Dunkin’, which has historically poured money into the creator economy, might have a more widespread effect than individual streamers being targeted and demonetized for the content of their broadcasts. YouTube‘s 2017 adpocalypse made it clear what can happen to creators and their income if enough big advertisers withdraw from a platform en masse–and AT&T, JPMorgan Chase, and Dunkin’ are in fact big.
