Twitch is expanding its ad incentive program to pay more money to more creators. Twitch began offering select streamers a flat, guaranteed payment in exchange for running a set amount of ads for a set number of hours earlier this year. Twitch is now expanding the program to include more partners and altering the payout structure to compensate creators more.
Payouts from the ad incentive program were previously calculated using a CPM model. Streamers would be paid a flat fee for every 1,000 ads that were watched on their channel.
Affiliates are not yet included in this new program, which launches on June 15th, but they will be eligible for the 55 percent ad revenue starting in August if they run three minutes of ads per hour. Twitch will also turn off the obnoxious pre-roll ads for users who watch ads for the same amount of time.
Twitch was investigating ways to increase earnings by potentially decreasing revenue share with its top streamers, according to a Bloomberg report from April. Twitch has not confirmed that it will make any changes to its current model, despite immediate backlash from the platform’s biggest names.
This new ad program expansion could be a way to cushion the blow of any yet-to-be-announced changes.
One of Twitch streamers’ biggest concerns has been income consistency. The ad incentive program was created to relieve some of the stress that comes with not being able to calculate monthly earnings accurately. We don’t know how much the average Twitch streamer makes, thanks to a data leak from 2021 that revealed how much some streamers were paid.
It’s anyone’s guess what that number is in relation to the money Twitch makes — remember, it’s based on the labor of its streamers.
