Twitch is planning to roll out a new method of paying creators, which will let streamers run ads in a way that guarantees a certain payout.
The new payout method, called the Ad Incentive program, was announced by Twitch over on its blog (which now seems to be removed). According to the post, the program will provide personalised offers to streamers.
Essentially, streamers will need to stream for a set number of hours, and have ads running at regular intervals. Then, depending on the agreement, they will receive a guaranteed payout. Twitch reporter Zach Bussey provided an example in a tweet.

The tweet shows an example of a $500 incentive, with two minutes of ads per hour, and at least 40 hours streamed. So it means running 80 minutes worth of ads over the course of 40 hours of streaming. Which roughly translates to just over £9 an hour. In a separate tweet Bussey showed how incentives can differ, like earning $800 for three minutes of ads per hour.
In the blog post Twitch claimed it’s doing this to help give streamers a more consistent income. The problem is that it will also only be available to select partners and affiliates. This means that affiliates with lower sub and follower counts still won’t be able to earn a consistent income. A highly requested change for payouts is to lower the minimum threshold of a payout. Currently you need to earn $100 to get a payout, meaning you need to get about 40 subscriptions a month to earn it every month. For smaller streamers, that just isn’t feasible.
It’s also unclear how much Twitch actually earns per ad, so there’s no way of knowing if this is a fair deal at all. It currently seems like a case of the streaming site ignoring creator requests, and doing what works better for themselves.
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Featured Image Credit: Twitch