MCV/DEVELOP News, events, research and jobs from the games industry
Twitch has announced a massive increase in revenue year-on-year, paying more than double the amount of money to individual partners in 2017 compared to last year. The exact figure is currently unknown, but on average 71 per cent more money was generated this year, with Twitch Prime bringing in 50 per cent more subscriptions for streamers. That’s one new sub every four seconds, says Twitch.
The news comes out of a keynote speech given at TwitchCon 2017 by CEO Emmett Shear and hosted by director of programming Marcus Graham. Other key executives also featured, including EVP broadcaster success Jonathan Shipman, VP developer success Kathy Astromoff and SVP commerce Ethan Evans.
Twitch also said it had seen success with its new 60-second Clips video feature, accumulating more than 1bn views of Clips on Twitch since its launch, including over 2.4m views for the most-watched Clip of all time by JurassicJunkie. More than 110,000 creators have also joined Twitch’s Affiliates Program within six months of its launch, while Twitch Extensions (a new set of tools allowing developers to help creators customise their channel pages with interactive experiences) have garnered over 15m viewers in the six weeks since launch.
Twitch also unveiled a swathe of new features, including a new streaming summary and achievement program launching in November 2017. Premieres and Rooms, meanwhile, will arrive in Q4 and will respectively allow creators to maximise viewership around new content by creating live first-viewing events and develop smaller, parallel chat groups for users with shared interests.
Subscription gifting is also targeting for pre-holiday in Q4, allowing anyone to gift a one-month subscription to any streamer’s channel to anyone on Twitch. Likewise, a beta for in-extension purchases will start in November, enabling partners and affiliates to earn revenue from developer created digital items that viewers buy within extensions.
