Twitch reveals increased revenue for streamers, new features for late 2017

Twitch has marked the occasion of their own TwitchCon event by releasing a series of milestones showing how several key performance indicators (KPI) have grown, in addition to shedding some light on what’s next for the streaming platform.

The news was shared in TwitchCon2017’s keynote address, given by CEO Emmett Shear. The keynote was hosted by the director of programming Marcus Graham and featured EVP of broadcaster success Jonathan Shipman, VP develop success Kathy Astromoff and SVP commerce Ethan Evans.  

The biggest concern for businesses is that revenue for streamers is up. Twitch have revealed a “massive” year-over-year increase in 2017, with more than double the amount of money paid to average partners, with an average of 71% more paid out. They’ve also revealed that the introduction of Twitch Prime, a service announced at TwitchCon2016, has been a huge success with a press release from Twitch claiming it’s boosted subscriptions by 50%, which works out as one new sub every four seconds.

Twitch isn’t just paying out more money: it’s paying out to more people. 110,000 creators have also joined Twitch’s Affiliates Program within the first six months of its launch.

Meanwhile, the company has also found engagement success with its new 60-second Clips video feature, which has seen 1bn views on Twitch since the feature launched, including 2.4m views on the below clip, the most popular on Twitch.  

What’s next for the service? Subscription gifting is coming before the holiday season this year, which will allow anyone to gift a one-month sub for any partnered streamer to anyone on Twitch.

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.

Many of the new features are coming in November, including stream summaries to help streamers get a sense of where they’re at. Another feature, Raids, seems open to abuse.

Here’s the description: “A new /raid feature allows streamers to seamlessly let their viewers join a raid and then drive traffic to another streamer. This new feature also includes tracking to see who raided your channel and improved moderation features, such as the ability to choose who can raid your channel through new settings.”

While there is a way to moderate the feature, it brings to mind this article, and also older raids, when an online community would invade a game or space for their own reasons.