Popular streamers on Twitch are furious at the platform after it announced new advertising policies that would severely limit revenue for big and small-time streamers.
Streamer Zach Bussey screenshotted the updated policy and tweeted it out on Tuesday. The policy change then became the biggest news in the gaming world as streamers from around the site came to announce their displeasure at the limits on the kind of ads that streams can put in their videos.
Under the new policy, logos for sponsored companies can only take up 3% of the screen, banner ads are no longer allowed and “burned-in” video and audio ads are banned.
Burned-in ads are videos or pieces of audio pulled from other sources and placed over the stream. Streamers will still be able to talk about and unbox sponsored products.
The response was overwhelmingly negative, with many popular streamers calling for a boycott of the popular game-streaming platform and others announcing they would leave the platform if the changes went through.
“There is no reason for Twitch to do this other than to monetize, monopolize, and take advantage of smaller streamers,” Zack Hoyt said in a video response.
Live events that are hosted on Twitch, such as tournaments for popular games, would also be severely restricted. Many of those events, like the popular Games Done Quick, would be forced to change their funding strategies significantly to stay on Twitch.
Streamers rely almost exclusively on sponsorships to pay the bills.
Although Twitch allows streamers to get donations from fans, only the extremely large streamers are able to make a living on donations alone.
Twitch apologized for the chaos that followed the announcement but essentially restated its aims in its response to the outrage.
“We wanted to clarify our existing ads policy that was intended to prohibit third party ad networks from selling burned in video and display ads on Twitch,” the company said in a statement.
“That you for sharing your concerns, and we appreciate the feedback. We’ll notify the community once we have updated the language,” Twitch said.
