Inside the gaming community, there are many places for a person to enjoy gaming content. Two of the biggest platforms, Twitch and YouTube, are where anyone can easily find creators to watch. Need help beating a certain level in a video game? Type it up and instantly hundreds of videos by a plethora of content creators pop up.
Before live streaming was appealing to creators, most gamers were unified under one website; YouTube. To them, YouTube was the only place for let’s players to connect with their audience and distribute content. It is also where these gamers were able to make income off of their content. But in 2014, a streaming service called Twitch was created. After about one year, it created different avenues for streamers to directly earn money for their content. Twitch drew in so many internet personalities that let’s players. These former lets players began to neglect their YouTube audience in favor of live streaming on the platform.
Although many content creators use both platforms, many have focused more on Twitch because of its multifaceted way of earning income. On Twitch, a streamer can earn money via direct transactions called donations. They can also play advertisements, and even partner with Twitch to create a subscribe button. If a viewer purchases a five-dollar subscription, then half the money goes to Twitch, and half goes to the streamer. These numbers can shift according to a streamer’s partnership, so the rate is not always 50/50. In return, the user can access emotes that the streamer has created on their own for chat use, as well as access to the chat in subscriber only mode. Critics of Twitch, however, have brought up cases where they claim Twitch had banned streamers too harshly for their demeanor, use of copyrighted content on-stream and/or their use of language.
“If Twitch keeps this up, I honestly believe that people will start to move to another platform,” Gamebyte said. “In fact, this seems to already be happening.”
Obviously, some streamers do outrageous things. But Twitch’s practically cruel, ban-hammer has some creators running back to YouTube.
From a Twitch-streamers perspective, YouTube’s drawbacks outweigh the benefits. For example, there is no system set up for creators to set up a partnership and increase their follower base, but instead only the old YouTube system of ad revenue. Ad revenue used to be very loose, and quite random, but products and companies whose ads were attached to controversial videos received a range of backlash. As a result, YouTube placed an algorithm that looks at uploaded content, and verifies if it is appropriate to put advertisements on those videos. It appears, that the model of using both to make the most money has worked best for the video game community. YouTube makes money from advertisement deals, Twitch makes money by donations, and the creators benefit from both.