For years Twitch.tv didn't accept any form of gambling content, but then Jason Somerville developed a following by streaming poker, a game not in their directory, and they saw an untapped market.
Years later, Twitch Poker has gone from lonely streamers like Jason to highly produced poker shows such as the World Series Of Poker Europe Livestream.
This move showed a willingness to adapt to whenever the market calls for it, rather than adhering to a rigid set of rules, a quality CEO Emmett Shear made sure to showcase on his TwitchCon Keynote speech.
Twitch’s New Features - Analytics, Community and Monetization
The keynote was focused on celebrating the creators that use Twitch and made it what it is today, Shear talked about many features that will make Twitch content creators’ life easier.
- Stream Summary: Detailed analytics on the viewer base. Not just basic stats like average age and male to female distribution, but also follows, chat activity and surface top clips.
- Achievements: A detailed map to achieve Affiliate and Partner status, keeping tracks of the content creator's progress toward each milestone and also serves as a tutorial to learn to basics.
- Raids: Purposely named like the co-op missions in MMORPGs, allows streamers to let their views join a "raid" and drive traffic to another streamer. Similar to the "hosting" feature, but it also adds improved analytics and moderation features.
- Rituals: This feature enables creators to signal to their chat that a viewer is new to the Stream and allows others to welcome them with their particular salute. It helps to create a community.
- Premieres: This feature works for video uploads rather than live streams. This allows users to stream Vlogs or pre-recorded shows at a certain date before it becomes available on the platform. This is to create an event around each upload.
- Subscription gifting: This allows people to give each other a virtual gift card for a 1-month subscription to the streamer of their choice.
Further, Shear plans to continue with Twitch’s commitment of finding as many avenues for creators to monetize their content as possible, citing last year’s 71% increase in the average revenue generated, with more monetization avenues coming by the end of the year.
You may have noticed that some of these features make Twitch closer to YouTube, that’s not a coincidence.
Twitch vs YouTube
Not only is Twitch encouraging non-video game related content, but they are also promoting the hashtag #TwitchVlog to encourage Vlogers to use them instead of YouTube.
Meanwhile, YouTube continues to push YouTube Gaming to compete with Twitch, but their platform, while popular with audiences, is not doing its best for the Content Creators.
Following the “Adpocalypse”, YouTube has been demonetizing anything that can offend anybody. Since that covers everything fun, many popular creators have relied on alternative platforms like Patreon.
For aspiring-but-broke poker content creators, however, the options are limited to just Twitch, a platform that seems to be welcoming them with open arms.