Twitch Unveils Its 2023 Creator Plans in an Open Letter
Source: Twitch
Twitch announced its plans for 2023 in an open letter by Chief Product Officer, Tom Verrilli, and Chief Monetization Officer, Mike Minton. The plan highlighted over a dozen updates for creators in areas such as monetization, discovery, audience interaction and engagement,data and analytics, and more.
Here are highlights of what has the potential to be the most impactful.
Monetization: Twitch plans to test new native features for brand assets and integrations as part of new sponsorship solutions in order to make branded content deals more impactful. These include channel skins and clickable branded graphics that streamers can add across their channels. Once officially rolled out, this should help ease a lot of pain points that come with creator and brand collaborations on Twitch as it will make it easier for creators to integrate brands in a way that can drive value for their partnerships with less disruption for viewers.
Ads Incentive Program: Streamers will be able to have more control over the number of ads that are being run on their channel as part of the program. In addition, they will get more visibility of when ads are able to run so they can give their viewers a heads up.
Promotion: In an effort to help streamers make their channel and content more discoverable on and off Twitch, streamers will be able to export vertical, short form videos of their streams to share across other platforms. They will also get a new Pinned Clips tool, which allows them to pin up to 20 clips of their channel. This will help give new viewers insight into the type of content that they can expect from the creator.
Discovery: The launch of a Discovery Feed for mobile, where viewers will be able to scroll through a feed with recommended channels and clips to discover new creators.
Audience Interaction & Engagement: To enhance audience interaction and engagement, Twitch will launch a new messaging tool that will allow streamers to connect with their communities by sending them video and clip messages. They will also get a new Q&A tool to get prompts from their audiences, which can then be vetted and approved by their moderators before they go live.
Data & Analytics: Twitch is introducing a new feature called Creator Home, which will be available to all Affiliate Partners. This hub will provide personalized and relevant tips, as well as actionable recommendations, to help streamers grow their channels. Additionally, it will give streamers access to new data, such as tag impression analytics, which will show them where their viewers are coming from, like the Browse Page or search results. It will also provide information on the best days and times to stream based on category to help them maximize viewership.
More Transparency: Finally, Twitch will launch a dedicated experiments help page to provide streamers with insight into the experiments being rolled out, along with regular updates. This will give creators a better understanding of what's happening on the platform and what they can expect in the future.
What Will It Mean For 2023
2022 was a challenging year for Twitch, particularly in regards to its relationship with creators. Despite launching a number of well-received features and tools, decisions such as getting rid of Host Mode and changing its revenue share split with creators caused some issues. However, Twitch's plans to experiment and launch new features in the current year are promising, as they reflect the company's efforts to listen to and address creator feedback. By providing new ways for creators to make money, grow their audiences, interact with their communities, and access deeper analytics, Twitch is working towards helping creators succeed on the platform. With YouTube and TikTok pushing more into live streaming, these updates will be important in keeping creators engaged on its platform.
