Why I left the Twitch Affiliate program.

Today I left the Twitch Affiliate program - the system by which streamers on Twitch earn money. Leaving means losing access to in-platform subscriptions,”hype trains”, emotes, channel points, and a few other tools. I did my research and sat on the idea for a week or so before pulling the trigger, but I think I made the right call for me. Time will tell if this was a foolish move, but I have my reasons.

The biggest one is that twitch makes more money off my streams than I do. In the last month, I have earned less than 20 cents off ads on twitch, and about 6 dollars off subscribers. That's not a lot, and it comes at the cost of all my viewers seeing ads.

In the ad saturated landscape of the internet right now, I like the idea of having an online presence that is as free of ads as I can make it. Leaving the affiliate program means that my content is no longer monetised and therefore will no longer have ads on it!

The second reason is that for the majority of my viewers, I am the only regular twitch stream they watch. I'm not joking. I have heard from so many people who have said to me "I don't really watch streams but I enjoy having yours on in the background" or "I don't care what you're playing, I'm here for the chat". What that says to me other than being a huge compliment, is that subscriber features like emotes and channel points are largely a waste of time for my audience. This bears out in my twitch stats. The person who uses my emotes the most? It's me. I use them in other channels sometimes. I can go a whole week without anyone in my chat using even a smiley face emote.

That means that my viewers get the same benefit from subscribing (no ads) as they get from me leaving the affiliate program. To my subscribers, all this is going to do is save them a few dollars a month.

I will encourage anyone who wants to support me to continue to do so via patreon, or to tip via kofi.

I don’t think this is something every creator should do - I do think genuinely that the affiliate program is a good idea for most people who want to take streaming seriously as an income stream, but here’s the other thing.

Twitch streaming is like playing poker. It is a gamble, and you can count cards and succeed with skill, but ultimately the payout scales based on how much you can invest in it. This is true in most online creator platforms I think. How good is your camera? How good is your computer? How well can you run the latest game? How willing are you to stream for hours at a time?

That last one is a huge deal for me as a disabled streamer. I deal with chronic fatigue, and streams running 3 hours will wipe me out completely for the rest of the day. And that’s not a long day to many streamers. I’ve heard “It’s barely worth streaming if you can’t be live for at least four hours”. I’ve heard streamers apologise for not being able to stream longer than 12 hours at a time before they need to sleep, because they feel like they need to be available to their audience at the expense of their health. Not everyone takes it to those extremes, but when the “successful” streamers are doing 24 hour stream-a-thons and logging on after midnight to grind out a little more audience interaction from their time, it makes me think… who is benefitting from this?

Because to me, when smaller streamers try to emulate these behaviours, I think who benefits most is Twitch & Amazon. The longer you run your stream, the longer people are incentivised to spend on twitch, the more ads your viewers see, and the more subscriptions they sell to remove ads. Any streamer with above 3 average viewers, 50 total followers, and a regular stream schedule can become an affiliate too. But the average amount of viewers across twitch is less than 1.

So there are hundreds of smaller accounts, people with one or fewer subscribers, who are making less than $50 a month for themselves from their streams being incentivised to stream for longer and longer, with twitch taking 50% of their revenue from subscriptions, and 45% from ads.

I’m not playing into that any more. I will stream for the amount of time I can. I will give my viewers what they showed up for (me 😉 ) and nothing more (ads) and if people want to help me they can, but it won’t be at the expense of subjecting those who aren’t looking to support me, with ads I earn next to nothing from anyway.

If you want to support me, and my creative endeavours, the best way to do that is Patreon, where you will get access to all the ttrpgs I have ever written, as well as input on the direction of my creative focus, early access to new content, and some special content I hope to deliver this year.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you tomorrow at 10am NZT AD FREE ON TWITCH.