Rune Starforge

Twitch is in an advertising nightmare situation. Advertisers are leaving the website and not returning. Twitch has controversy after controversy and can’t get its enforcement straight. I don’t know if the website will survive long term without serious changes. The solution to it is simple, brutal, and efficient. Ban all extremist/controversial/political content, or none of it. But simple is not often easy. To understand it, and what’s going on, we need to go back in time a bit. Youtube’s own “adpocalypse” began in March 2017. Major advertisers discovered their ads were appearing alongside controversial or extremist content (sound familiar?) A ton of key advertisers pulled ads from the platform, including AT&T, Pepsi, and others. The next two years were savage for Youtube. The website had to build an algorithm that could identify brand-friendly content against controversial content at scale. It wasn’t always right at first. Dozens of creators were banned, sometimes for no reason. That STILL happens sometimes today. Building this system cost millions, thousands of hours, and countless controversies and risks. But today, Youtube is the most sophisticated ad network in the world. It keeps viewers happy by not serving them too many ads (mostly), and keeps advertisers happy by serving their ads on relevant, brand-friendly content. During this same period, Twitch was instead investing in their live CDN (content delivery network) and in broadcasting rights, content, and streamers. They paid $90,000,000 to broadcast the Overwatch league. They signed multi-year partnerships with Riot Games to broadcast League of Legends. They paid streamers like Ninja and Shroud, also on contracts worth millions of dollars. None of this amounted to much. It’s safe to say that most of this money was wasted. Meanwhile, their ad system - the primary way for Twitch to make money - languished. If you want to buy ads on Twitch, you need to pay a high minimum (think $100,000+) and talk to someone physically there. The ads have limited/no targeting. Ads get served everywhere across the website, and often to irrelevant or controversial streamers. Because ads are served everywhere, Twitch is only as good as its worst streamer. Maybe Twitch figured that these problems would work themselves out if the content was good. But they didn’t, and the content is now on the decline. Extremists (on all sides) run huge communities on the platform. Major and notable advertisers (ADL, big six agencies) are telling Twitch the current state of advertising isn’t okay. And they’re right. Because Twitch didn’t invest in ad targeting and good systems when they should’ve, they’re now on the backfoot compared to every other platform. Their ad inventory is getting cheaper because the quality of their website is declining, forcing them to run more cheap ads to appease Amazon. The increased ad inventory means viewers are sometimes getting served 8 ads at once when joining a stream, causing viewers to leave the platform. And so here we are. Twitch has always operated from fear. They were afraid other websites would cannibalize their audience (Mixer) so they bought streamers. They thought Youtube would take their viewers so they bought broadcasting rights (LCS, OWL.) They thought big music would come for them so they spent millions building libraries and licensing rights. Meanwhile Youtube built systems to address these problems long-term, and instead was willing to fail for years knowing a better future was possible. Twitch is now in an unenviable situation. They’ve allowed high brand-risk streamers to be a significant percentage of their audience. The team responsible for enforcement (Trust & Safety) can’t determine who should and shouldn’t be on the platform. They can’t do this because they’re human and have inconsistent (or by some opinions malicious) policy coming from the top. They insert their opinions and pick favorites because that’s what humans do. Twitch communities are outraged (justifiably) that certain streamers get chosen to stay on Twitch and others are permanently banned. Twitch is shoehorned into this position of picking favorites. It can never work, the website quality will continue to go down, and advertisers will continue to leave. The choice ahead for @djclancy999 is clear to me. You must either ban ALL controversial and extremist content or none of it. And because a competitor already exists where all content is allowed and owns 10% of Twitch’s audience (Kick), the choice is pretty clear. This means politics (all sides), hateful content, and so on. Some people may argue this “line is unclear.” That was true in 2015 when we were figuring out advertising. But today it’s VERY clear and these categories are well understood. You can see each level of what’s controversial or not on Youtube’s pages or when you upload a Youtube video. You can try forcing this content into categories and then demonetizing that content, but it’s too far gone and the Twitch kingmaker system still throws that content to the top of discovery. You can’t fool advertisers, but this is a stop gap that might at least help temporarily. The worst place to sit though is in the middle. And that’s the problem here, the waffling. By being half-in on every decision Twitch has managed to anger everyone - advertisers, viewers, and streamers. I don’t care if it’s a supervillain level take but Twitch was much better as a gaming-focused website. It could’ve been the live streaming platform for everything, but again, the systems weren’t built and that ship has sailed to Youtube and Tiktok. By removing all controversial content and bringing it back to gaming, music, crafts, etc, you pull back in advertisers and your core audience. Your CPMs go back up and you can serve less ads for more money. You appease Amazon and also completely end the debacle that is selective enforcement of policies. You heal. I don’t know if Twitch is willing to make the tough decisions. Along with the above you probably need to massively cut staff (500 last year was a start but it’s still bloated.) Then you need to rebuild the Trust and Safety team, apply policy evenly to every broadcaster, and start work on true ad filtering. But it starts with banning all extremist and political content. Twitch has proven its incapable of handling the responsibility of moderating their website. The line has to be drawn here. When you make extreme mistakes, you have to enact extreme solutions. I used to love people having good vibes and sharing epic moments together in gaming. I used to love the community. Fixing this will require ruthless executive oversight. But without it, we’ll continue to see the slow and sad decline of the platform so many people fell in love with in the past.