Thousands of leaders of mind were self-created on Twitch. The platform turned into brand new media that anyone can use.
But in 2022, more and more broadcasters are leaving Twitch and moving to YouTube Live, Facebook Live, Mixer, and other live streaming platforms. Likewise, top content creators are fleeing, and their audiences follow them.
Let’s find out why it’s happening and how Twitch may solve this problem.
The actual scale of the disaster
Almost 30% of popular streamers tried to break up with Twitch at least once. However, most of them came back sooner or later. Cause Twitch brings money. It has to be a serious reason why a content maker wants to leave a platform that allows him to earn tens of thousands of dollars per month. In most cases, this is a way to stir up the audience, not a real threat.
Many streamers take a break and go on vacation. If they don’t want to share their personal life and shoot a vlog, it’s absolutely ok. Twitch broadcasters rarely behave like world-known celebrities.
Asmongold has 3,4 million followers on Twitch and is 12th in the overall rating. He dropped Twitch a few times cause he was tired of streaming and wanted to rest. However, such breaks for one or two months allowed him to recover and keep doing high-quality content.
In July 2022, he said he was leaving Twitch forever. But after a long silence, he came back in November.
Even when a popular streamer stops streaming for a while, he keeps in touch with subscribers and followers on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or other social networks. So people don’t feel abandoned.
But there are cases when streamers left Twitch forever. Over the past two years, more than 15 streamers from the top 300 have quit the platform. It’s a lot. Each had over a million subscribers and earned pretty good money, but they decided to sever all ties.
DrDisrespect, Sykkuno, LillyPichu, Ludwig, LazarBeam, Muselk — these are the most famous streamers from the top 100 list who left Twitch in the last two years. But hundreds of less-known broadcasters did the same.
Sure, Twitch is not dying. It’s still the biggest live-streaming platform in the world. But more and more content makers become disappointed with how things are going. In September 2022, a new wave of hate sped up the process. If nothing changes, Twitch and its owner Amazon will face a real problem in a few years.
The most common reasons for leaving Twitch
We’ve analyzed cases of 30 popular streamers who quit Twitch in the last two years and found three main reasons why broadcasters move to other live streaming platforms.
Some of them are entirely Twich’s fault. Recent platform policy changes were controversial, and many top content makers didn’t like them a lot. So let’s reveal them.
Exclusive contracts
It’s the most straightforward reason. Cause streaming is a full-time job for famous broadcasters. Of course, they love what they do, but earning money is essential.
Actually, Twitch brings streamers only a little money from paid subscriptions.
For example, here is Franio. He ranked #249 on Twitch. According to TwitchTracker data, he’s got about a thousand paid subscriptions this month (December 2022). It means that he earned about 2000-3000 dollars.
But the guy having 300k followers on Twitch may earn 3000 dollars just from a single marketing campaign. On average, paid subscriptions are only 5-15% of the streamer’s income. The remaining 85-95% are advertising products, performing special marketing events, donations from their fans, and selling branded goods.
Any exclusive contract means lots of money. But streamers aren’t allowed to go online anywhere but with the only platform. This is to poach the fans of this broadcaster. But, it really works cause more than half of the subscribers of famous content makers on Twitch are ready to move to another streaming service following their idols.
In 2019, Ninja, the #1 streamer on Twitch, signed a contract with the Mixer streaming platform. That was the most expensive deal with a broadcaster ever. Ninja had to stream on Mixer for a year and got $50 million. Sure, that amount of money was worth moving.
Most exclusive contracts are temporary. A year of a few, but when the time’s up, a streamer can decide what to do next. He may keep streaming on the platform or come back to Twitch ultimately. But most of them share their streaming time among websites.
Revenue changes
For most streamers, Twitch offers a standard option: 50% of paid subscription goes to a broadcaster, and the other 50% are taken by the platform.
Also, there are popular streamers who get a better 70/30 deal. In 2022, there were about 22 000 of them. Such streamers drive Twitch forward, so earlier, they had better conditions. It means that each $5 subscription brought them $3,5 but not $2,5. It’s an acceptable reason for a content maker to work hard and reach that level.
But In September 2021, Twitch announced significant changes in the subscription revenue policy. Top streamers who have earned their first $100,000 will be brought back to a 50/50 split. In simpler words, top streamers will lose 29% of their earnings immediately. And the community didn’t like it at all.
Well-known streamers expressed their views. And they were really sarcastic and harsh. Here are some of them:
Hundreds of broadcasters took part in a protest called #ADayOffTwitch. Famous and the most popular streamers just took a day off and weren’t streaming for 24 hours. They wanted to show that Twitch is nothing without content makers and their viewers.
But the platform didn’t listen to them. Some creators felt cheated and even announced their switch to other live-streaming services. Now, about 15 streamers having 100,000+ subscribers have left Twitch since September. Is it temporary or not? We’ll see.
Weird Twitch rules and bans
Twitch has lots of restrictions and prohibitions that streamers have to adhere to. If not, even a popular broadcaster may be banned permanently.
Moreover, some rules may be interpreted in a few ways. For example, in the “Hot Tube” category, female streamers can legally wear only bikinis and demonstrate their curves from any angle. But suppose a girl accidentally flushes her underwear during a gaming stream. In that case, she may quickly receive a strike and a temporary ban.
That’s not the only weird rule. Twitch has black-listed words that cannot be spoken on streams, which are not swearings. So if a creator says the F-word ten times a minute, that’s ok. But it’s enough to use “queer” or “homo” words just once to get banned.
Twitch doesn’t reveal the complete list of forbidden words. And that can be a problem cause many common words may be interpreted as insults. Ape, apple, cracker, crow, frog — Twitch might ban for using them. There were precedents.
Last year, Hasanabi was banned for saying “cracker” during his stream. Sure, the word has several meanings. And a hidden insult to white people is just one of them. His joke was on edge, but nothing really disturbing. And almost immediately after saying this word, he got banned.
Twitch rules are selective. Even the most famous streamer may be banned from nothing. In 2020, DrDisrespect, the #20 on Twitch, was permanently banned. And nobody knew the reason for it. Sure, his streaming style was cocky and aggressive, but he wasn’t violating rules on purpose. It had no sense cause Twitch brought him good money.
After all, proceedings lasted 1,5 years, and he was finally unbanned but decided to fully move to YouTube. And we can understand him. He was banned, lost all his earnings on Twitch, and didn’t know what for.
Because of these cases, many streamers began diversifying their streaming activities to become less dependent on Twitch. As a result, some of them decided to leave Twitch. They moved to YouTube Live cause this service offered streamers better stability and confidence.
***
Twitch is still the most popular live-streaming service in the world. The amount of viewers is overgrowing, and everything seems fine. But when many top streamers decide to leave the platform, it’s the first wake-up call showing that something has gone wrong.
Now, these situations are rather exceptions than cases that occur often. But the last changes on the platform were controversial. The community is boiling, but Twitch doesn’t want to do anything to calm it down. So it’s tough to predict how things will go in the nearest future.
