Where to find me: Youtube: piped.video/devinnash Community: discord.gg/devin Watch: twitch.tv/devinnash Support: patreon.com/devinnash Consult: bit.ly/consultwithdevinnash If my work has positively impacted you, you can find 150 more videos on my Patreon for $5.

The @Twitch ban update is one of the more severe a social platform has implemented. If you ban a person, they can no longer see chat. But also, any additional accounts they create are IP shadowbanned (they can post messages but no one can see them.)

With 100,000 subs, Kai Cenat will lose $1,071,440 in 2023 just from Twitch's sub split changes. Twitch needs to put every creator at a 70/30 split no matter what it takes. Creators like Kai are the most innovative in the game and deserve to be fairly rewarded for it.

Streamers are STILL being DMCA'd for clips/VODs they deleted. Why? They're still on Twitch's server even if you deleted them. Below are my deleted clips. Yet here's one they stored from 2016: clips-media-assets2.twitch.t… We deleted our entire legacy and Twitch still didn't protect us.

It is INSANE that @Twitch informs partners they deleted their content - and that there is more content in violation despite having NO identification system to find out what it is. Their solution to DMCA is for creators to delete their life's work. This is pure, gross negligence.

It speaks to how obsessed we are with clout that people view this as failure. Guy has 25 million dollars. He streams a 19 year old game for fun and is still top .1% of Twitch. This mindset that everything needs to be about viewership is toxic for creators. gamerant.com/ninjas-twitch-v…

How to understand this is: the top 500 creators will earn 29% less revenue per subscriber after reaching $100,000 earned in a year. No other Twitch streamer will be effected. More alarming in this post is Twitch saying they can't afford the run the website. Explanation below.

My Official Novo Response to the Arcadum Situation Read: tl.gd/n_1srq9me

The issue of gambling on @Twitch should have resolved months ago with a platform wide ban. I left Twitch over this issue and still feel the exact same as eight months ago when I originally took that stand. Gambling is horrible for the platform. Get rid of it.

This is NOT a gambling ban. Headline readers are getting this wrong. Twitch doesn't say they are banning luck-based gambling - ONLY certain websites that "aren't licensed in the U.S." - Unfortunately, this leaves plenty of room for gambling to remain on the website come Oct. 18th

After his $1,000,000 community giveaway tonight, @Trainwreckstv has now given away more money than any other Twitch content creator in history. An incredible use case of one person elevating a whole platform towards good. Awe-inspiring.

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.

Imagine putting a feature in Twitch VODs where the streamer can edit and mute a small section of it. Nah - let's just tell them to delete all their VODs and clips and a career's worth of memories. Twitch had years to address this.

For context/clarity - we tested this using main and alt accounts. Unbanning removes the shadowban from all accounts. I'm a fan of giving more power to broadcasters. These new tools enable us to curate toxicity from our communities with more reliability.

Twitch should never ban streamers caught in TOS violations by viewer bait. It encourages trolls to play a cat-and-mouse game where the streamer inevitably loses. Don't ban if the streamer removes the content in good faith. Disempower trolls and the problems they create go away.

Twitch hasn't walked back forced platform exclusivity for all creators *and* their terms of service still stipulate that they are EXCLUSIVELY able to control all advertising on your live stream. This apology is smooth words hiding sharp intentions.

one thing I never hear talked about with Mr. Beast is his art of asking. dude dialed 9 figure net worth people for fifteen hours straight to raise $12,000,000. absurd levels of agency needed to do this. probably as important of a skill as his content. lesson here.

No one in media got this Twitch exclusivity announcement right. Headline news is infuriatingly clickbait. Streamers will misinterpret this news. Here's what really happened 🧵 - tl;dr - you're still Twitch exclusive where it matters.

You shouldn't get to take 50% of someone's income just for being a platform. In any other business model this is an insane notion. Twitch is taking more than any other major platform. If they don't change direction, the next streamer's rise to the top won't be on Twitch.

INCREDIBLE - @LudwigAhgren makes @Twitch history by surpassing @Ninja's 2018 record with the highest monthly subscribers on Twitch. This is astounding considering Ninja achieved this with a Drake collab AND a Twitch Prime drop at Fortnite's peak. Ludwig is in a class of his own.

People who are cheering about Twitch removing @Amouranth's revenue will be real mad soon when their favorite streamer gets nuked for being a brand risk. If you think this stops at sexual content, think again.

RIP Byron. You were a vanguard to the gaming industry in life. My hope is that you continue that trend in your passing. Let your journey be a beacon to everyone that we need change in mental health support and toxic online culture. Be good to each other. Lift each other up.

Reconsider.

Phenomenal thread by xQc. I'm going to back it up with data and expose a bit more. This botting problem has stolen millions of dollars from legitimate creators. It's also a deliberate tactic employed by several major agencies and streamers. -> 🧵 First, aside from an agency or two, most don't intentionally view bot their talent. It's the streamers themselves. What ended up happening is the viewbotting streamers moved up in the directory. Over years of doing this, they were discovered because of Twitch's kingmaker system. So major agencies picked them up and now just look the other way. They all have the same data I have, but them ignoring the viewbotting is easy, they have plausible deniability, and it represents 30-40% of their revenue in many cases, as we'll see below. xQc refers to 'ad packages' - these are sponsorships given to streamers. A brand agency will win a portion of yearly advertising budget from a company. Either that agency or the company will reach out to talent agencies, who will then provide their roster. The average deal will involve several talent from multiple agencies. The deal structure is pretty simple: - Deliverables: What the streamer needs to do for the deal. Usually: Stream for (x hours, usually 1-3), chatbot rotation timer, on screen banner rotation timer, !command, info section, sometimes CTAs and sometimes a Youtube video. - Rate: Generally a streamer can expect to earn between $1 and $3 per CCV (concurrent viewer) per hour. Aka a 100 viewer streamer can expect a sponsorship (with these deliverables) of between $80-$120 an hour. Rates are almost always counted with CCV as the only metric in mind. Agencies are lazy, and in all my time in the industry (since 2015 now?) I've never seen an actual formula employed for these deals outside the ones we used. The industry average rate is $1.27 (over 2000 deals we have data on executed 2010 -> 2023) but the rate trends higher for higher viewer streamers. Top 1% streamers are rare, and agencies push up their rates. Their industry average is about $2.19 per viewer, per hour in the top 100, with many exceeding $3. So a 20,000 viewer streamer will earn about $43,800 per hour, minus 20% ($8,760) or total = $35,040. If you read my last thread, you'll know that the problem xQc alludes to represents about 30-40% of total viewership on Twitch. Over the last 14 days, Twitch has made an 11% correction. Average viewers are down 11% (-252,770), and hours watched are down 11% (-84,930,847). Across all streams, there is -1.18 less viewers on average. So now let's look at an example typical deal. A 10,000 viewer streamer with 30% viewbots earning $2/CCV will earn about $16,000/hour for sponsorships assuming a 20% take. Most agencies do a deal with the brand directly and then give out money to the streamers through separate contracts, and then lie and take closer to 40-50%, but that's another thread (heh.) Anyway, the streamer with the viewbots earns the $16,000/hour. The agency earns $4,000 (20% of TDV) and everyone (except the ecosystem itself) is happy. The same streamer without viewbots goes down to 7000 CCV. They now earn $11,200 an hour, and the agency earns $2,800. And this is assuming the rate stays consistent at $2/CCV - it often goes down. You can see in this example, the streamer and agency lost 30% of the deal just from not viewbotting. Twitch's policy is to NEVER ban unless they have definitive proof (bot shown on screen) of viewbotting. They state this is to prevent false positives (innocent people getting banned, or maliciously attacked.) So now you know these numbers and that: - This has been going on for YEARS (since at least 2017) - It's almost impossible to get caught unless you're a complete idiot and show it on screen. (and yet some people still do!) - The entire industry, including Twitch itself, is incentivized to let this problem walk. - The problem is way worse than even Twitch corrected for over the last two weeks. Now, earlier I mentioned the difference between brand agencies and talent agencies. Talent agencies have zero incentive to fix the view botting problem for the reasons above, so they just ignore that their streamers do it. But brand agencies represent brands first, and we care a LOT about how our advertising dollars are spent. Brand agencies are incentivized to get the highest ROAS (return on advertising spend) so we are constantly looking for fraud. So when we see a 30-40% fraud rate on Twitch, that is a joke and we simply pull our budget to other sites. For perspective, Youtube (Twitch's direct competition), has a 2025 IVT (invalid traffic rate) of 3.5%. Google Adwords is about 11% to 22% in the worst cases. However the CPMs are also a LOT better, and I pay between 40-50% less per 1,000 viewers than I do on Twitch. So in what universe would I advertise on Twitch? We became aware of this problem in 2021 or so and pulled our ads from Twitch to other social. In just our deal flow from 2022 -> 2025, it represents millions of dollars that would have gone to broadcasters. We put that money to great creators anyway on YT and other places. But sadly most of the money from the rest of the industry evaporated back into digital ads or traditional. Even worse, most top brand agencies experimented with livestream ad budget over 2022 to 2025. When they all finally discovered this, they realized they got burned for hundreds of thousands of dollars with little to no ROAS, and so they left, probably never to return. Viewbotting stole MILLIONS from legitimate creators, and pushed them down in discovery. The lack of action from Twitch, and the top streamers that do this, burnt out advertisers and quite literally held back the whole industry. A healthy advertising ecosystem with low IVT would have made Twitch look a lot more like Youtube is today, and represented tens of thousands more jobs for livestreaming creators. So make no mistake that viewbotters are the worst sort of scum. I am grateful this topic is getting more attention, and hopefully with this context you can see why legitimate creators like xQc are so pissed off about it. It harms the entire industry including him. We are lucky to have people like him who stay honest and will talk about this when it's not popular to do so. The reality is a few people made short term profit in exchange for the long term destruction of livestreaming as a whole. Put simply, the viewbot problem is way worse even after this fix, people are still doing it, and even with the correction, it still won't bring advertisers back. It's absolutely a step forward and I applaud Twitch for that. But we have a long way to go to repair the damage that's been done.

Twitch is making the rounds again for incompetent decision making and If you've ever wondered "why isn't Twitch fixing this!?" this thread is for you. Let's clear up some misconceptions and have an honest conversation about where the company is at. The biggest reason you see Twitch in this state is simply that the company is a ghost of its former self. Twitch is run as a demo product for IVS - the Twitch architecture they sell to companies like Kick that want to build their own streaming service. In 2022 when most of you knew Twitch at its height, it had roughly 2500 employees. When it became apparent that the site was not sustainable, they had a 400 person layoff (March 2023) then another 400 in late 2023, then ANOTHER 500 in January 2024. Today Twitch is a shadow of what it was and is generously valued at about $46 billion. But Amazon is a 2.27 TRILLION dollar company. That means that best case, and $46b really is best case, Twitch is about 2% of Amazon's total portfolio. This was from a Needham analyst and I think the real number is much less, but let's assume that's true. Twitch is only mentioned a handful of times in earnings calls and financial disclosures, and never on its own. In 10 years Twitch has come up in Amazon public reports 4 times. 3 were in the Q1 earnings call in 2021, and the Q1 earnings call in 2024. They both were one sentence, and referred to Twitch as part of Amazon's advertising package. The 4th mention was a Q1 2025 Earnings Call, and was an Amazon executive mentioning Twitch as part of a "non-profitable sector." It has never had its own financial specifics listed publicly in a 10-K, meaning it's not material enough for Amazon to give it separate reporting. In late 2024 Dan Clancy (current CEO of Twitch) said Twitch is "not profitable at this point" and that revenue was at a five-year low. This is 9 years into the companies lifecycle. When I got into brand advertising I started with Twitch and thought I was running hot because I was doing $20,000-$50,000 influencer activations for gaming sponsorships for streamers on the platform. Then I expanded my agencies client base, 10x'd those deal values, and realized absolutely no one cares about Twitch. It's simply too weird, too parasocial, too extreme because of dominant political streamers and drama farmers for most advertisers to look at. If you are a non-gaming brand it is a joke to advertise on Twitch, and it's because of Twitch's direct choices to platform the types of streamers it does that this is so. And these days warring streamer communities will literally crawl email addresses of VPs of Marketing and warn them about advertising there. This happened to more than one of my clients when we focused budget there. It's unhinged and all just too much trouble to bother. Even in the world of livestreaming Twitch has lost out to Youtube and Tiktok Live. So it's not even a primary choice for advertisers who want that inventory. Youtube Live is 50% of the market, with 13.26 billion watched hours. Tiktok Live comes next at 9.23 billion, or 14.9% of the market. Twitch is half of that at 4.35 billion, representing only 6.3% of the market. For perspective, 8 years ago Twitch was over 75% of the market. That's how far it's fallen. So if you wonder why Twitch appears so incompetent and the laughing stock of Twitter, it's just not a relevant platform. Most of the truly great minds that worked there have left and the few that remain are marginalized and mired in corporate nonsense where any idea gets sunk into endless bureaucracy and never implemented. Most of the people left are enjoying the free meals at Twitch HQ and 6 figure salaries in San Francisco, and hoping AI doesn't clean them out of a job. Amazon doesn't need or care to fix it. It gives them advertising exposure to gaming and 16-36 year old male demos and is a great sales pitch for IVS web services. They do not care about the content or the creators. Amazon is a consumer-goods brand, not an ad network like Google is. That is why you see Youtube as such a priority for Google - because it's ad network is integral to its success. That is also why Youtube generates tons of profit, because of all of Google's business model can feed into it. But Amazon has a much weaker ad network, and it's directed towards selling its products on Amazon. It was never, and will never be, a content brand. They just don't care about that. If this post feels like I'm dooming on Twitch, I'm not. I actually think Twitch is pretty AI-resistant and a great platform to create on if you have a solid top-level discovery funnel that doesn't depend on it. You should never ever expect new viewers from Twitch. I also think it is not so great a loss leader for Amazon that it won't die and instead just remain a rudderless ship, with features gradually being stripped so it doesn't bleed Amazon's pockets too much. That could change in a long-term recession, but it's unlikely. I still love the platform and watch it everyday - mostly the OG gaming creators like Lirik and CohhCarnage who I think are the lifeblood of it. I just wish it was honest with itself and did what it does best, be a community-driven gaming platform. It's sad to see it lose its way. I don't see that improving without an extreme visionary CEO taking it on and convincing Amazon it needs serious change. I miss what Twitch was, and I'm still adamant that banning all political content is the first step to getting it back there. I'm grateful though that there's still a lot of authentic creators and I hope they still make careers on the platform, albeit they are wise enough to diversify. But if you've ever wondered why nothing seems to change and they make mistake after mistake, this is why. It's sometimes funny to witness how hilariously bad they mess stuff up but it's unfortunate in that it negatively impacts a lot of lives, both creators and users. I hope it changes, but I wouldn't hold your breath.

Top creators like Kai are pushing content to the next level and that's what is driving these meteoric sub counts. Twitch is blessed to get creators like this streaming on the platform but it won't last unless they fairly add value back to those creators.

I spent a month researching mental health in streaming to create this video. Please share this discussion. Streaming has a mental toll much larger than the public gives it credit for. We need to normalize broadcasting as a real and difficult profession. piped.video/e0kUaWmX3Yg

When Twitter is literally fine next week I hope everyone remembers what a media grift this all was.

Viewers paying for streamer exposure feels terrible. Worse, the results are uncertain - recommendations aren't views. But most disturbing is what this suggests about the company's thinking. There's no regard for culture with this move. Every money making option is on the table.

The current model of livestreaming is unsustainable. The future of live content is events. This is a 🧵about the problem with livestream content right now, and how a few creators are ahead of the curve.

The Twitch meta is permanently changing thanks to the success of streamer collaborations. Rust average viewers have increased 586% in just 15 days. Collab is the future of Twitch.

The livestream/Twitch viewbot issue is way more prevalent and destructive for platforms than most people realize. It's a difficult problem and no one knows how to fix it yet. When my agency was running ads on Twitch, we noticed a weird problem: Our brand's conversions were worse the more viewers a stream had. The largest streams have the least sales. 500-1000 viewer streams often have the best sales, and outperform many 30,000+ viewer creators. We initially attributed this to diminishing viewer returns - AKA - not everyone in large streams is as invested as core, small communities. This is untrue though because the few large streams that do have authentic viewership overperform on ad campaigns. So it had to be something else. We did some digging and were shocked at the number of top 500 broadcasters that are being viewbotted or view botting themselves. We estimate it is around 400 to 430 of the top 500, not including embeds. It is incredibly easy to do. Up until a couple weeks ago in 2025 you could literally open multiple headless browser windows to count as +1 viewer, and even now you can still count 2 viewers on two separate incognito browsers (go try it.) Twitch finally recently fixed this, so the current strategy is to spin up thousands of proxies through a service like AWS (ironically) and DigitalOcean. Twitch doesn't punish anyone for view botting (unless a streamer shows it on screen) because according to them, "we can't know if its the streamer or someone else." However even then their enforcement is selective, with celebrities like Ray J openly admitting in July to viewbotting and getting no punishment. Because discovery is non-existent on Twitch and the platform is a Kingmaker system, there's no reason to not view bot unless you have a moral compass - a rare thing in streaming these days. Viewbots are not only set up by streamers themselves, but also agencies and managers. This is to fool sponsors (like me) into paying $20,000+ (about $1-3 per ccv) for viewers that are not there. In 2025, most major brands have already run campaigns with horrible results, and so they and their agencies simply don't advertise on Twitch anymore. The untold story is millions gone from creators and the livestreaming platforms themselves because of this. This combines with the Adpocalypse I wrote about here some months ago, where I predicted a 40-50% ad revenue drop due to Twitch platforming controversial political content. This ended up being exactly what happened, and this one-two combo puts Twitch on a difficult path. I suspect the most prominent viewbotting streamers will be revealed in the coming months, one way or another. It's an open secret in the industry, and some broadcasters know where the bodies are buried. It's only a matter of time before someone blabs. No one will miss these offenders, and they're usually synonymous with pushing scam sponsors and exploiting their viewers in various ways. Thankfully more attention is also recently coming to the matter via folks in the know such as (@Trainwreckstv and @Asmongold) - and I would trust their posts and clips on the subject entirely. They know a lot more than people give them credit for and the fact that they're both on a very small list of people who have made it legitimately pisses them off enough to educate others about it. If you're concerned with this problem @Twitch, you need to setup manual investigative teams to analyze top Twitch streams, take down botnets, and issue C&Ds to major providers. You probably can't win the war from an engineering standpoint, for a lot of reasons beyond the scope of this thread. Anyone working on the problem at Twitch or Kick, feel free to DM me and I'll help if I can. The livestreaming platforms aren't incentivized to do the right thing because more viewers equals more sponsor deals and a better "looking" platform. But what goes around comes around, and the bill will come due. This exact thing happened in esports, when most brands during 2019-2021 realized that teams couldn't convert product sales like they claimed. Fast forward today and esports is a fraction of its original power and mostly owned by foreign interests and gambling proxies. The people hurt the most by these bad actors are the legitimate creators trying to make it. If you're one of these people, you're playing a rigged game by trying to funnel new viewers in from livestreaming platforms. You should be doing VOD and value creation on @YouTube (events, story-driven video) and driving those viewers into places like @Patreon that offer fair creator splits. Twitch hasn't invested successfully in small creator discovery for a decade and you are on your own. The platform will hobble onward so long as Amazon can justify the profit loss in exchange for its media impact and times are good. You don't need to be caught in that downward spiral by being dependent on it. Diversify (multistream) and don't be a victim. Livestreaming will never be taken seriously by major sponsors unless these problems are addressed. Until then (if ever) the industry will be a shadow of what it could be.

The vast majority of men have zero concept of the female barrier to entry to streaming. Takes like this make it instantly clear these people have no interaction with industry females. They think the lack of top female streamers is due to an inability to process negative feedback or put in the time on the grind but the truth is they have zero perspective on the sheer insanity even 100 viewer female streamers deal with on a daily basis. I've repped a lot of the top 100 female talent and it's utterly unhinged. Hundreds of daily DMs, constant doxxing, people showing up at houses and real life events, constant oversexualization, literally everything you do is objectified. If a female ever did do the stuff Kai does she'd be objectified first before ever being judged for the content itself. Case and point look at the dumbass replies to this quoted tweet. @Amouranth is getting cooked yet she's done a ton of collabs (Iggy Azalea literally a month ago), Streamer Royale, her own events, etc. She can do industry defining work but she'll just be known as an OF girl first instead of all the amazing cool shit she does because that's how this industry rolls. I've been a top 500 streamer, public enemy #1 of Reddit for a while, lots of hate, etc. It's nowhere near what even a 500 viewer female streamer deals with, and yes that's without plugging an OnlyFans or marketing towards sexuality. I promise you as a non-streamer or white male dude broadcasting to 7 viewers or whatever you have no concept of what a female goes through. There's no question Kai is putting out the best content and the market rewards that. But there's a graveyard of nameless thousands of females that would've otherwise tried but got instantly put off by how terrible they're treated. Then when they call it out, people say it's their content that sucks and they should toughen up. That's the problem @pokimanelol is alluding to. We will never close the gap of how male-dominated livestreaming is until we can have that conversation.

Here’s the truth about the Twitch Adpocalypse from an actual ad buyer. I’ve seen too much confusion and bad data on this issue. Are individual streamers to blame? What’s going on with streamers getting demonetized? Is this a political/extreme content issue or something else? Let’s go -> 🧵 The short answer is yes, there is an ad problem on Twitch. Twitch isn’t keeping pace with the growth of digital advertising, which increased 7.4% in 2024. Recently, multiple key advertisers paused ads on Twitch. The catalyst for the pause is increased media attention on high risk content (political/polarizing) being featured on Twitch. This is why you see Twitch rushing to apply CCLs (content classification labels) that we’ll talk about later. But IMO Twitch is not losing advertisers primarily for this reason. They’re gone and might stay gone for more practical reasons we’ll discuss below. Ad budgets are not created equal. Twitch is considered a “niche ad product” or “experimental budget.” Most agencies don’t know if Twitch ads work or not, so they assign a small percentage of their budget to see. The rest of their budget goes to tried and true market leaders like Adsense and Meta. So the first thing to understand is, when a niche ad product underperforms and/or has controversy, it is the easiest and fastest to cut. As advertisers, we evaluate where we spend budget on four factors, in this order: - ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend): Do the ads actually work? Do they make us money? - Targeting: How well can I control the ads I run? Can I control where they show up? Can I control if they end up on ineffective/bad placements? - Demographics: How relevant are the viewers of these ads to the client’s product I’m selling? (Age/gender/disposable income/etc) - Brand Safety: Will the ad run alongside content that is destructive to my client? (Politics, porn, polarizing content) Twitch ranks the lowest of any non-adult digital ad spending options on all four. If you understand this, you understand the truth of the Twitch adpocalypse is just that it sucks to run ads on Twitch. There is no real drama or individual streamer bringing down the website. Some are doing more damage than others, but overall - the system itself is antiquated and ineffective. Especially compared to incredible options like Adsense, Meta, or even Tiktok. There is little sense in running ads if you aren’t a game publisher, and I’ve never seen any strong case studies that show success on Twitch ad campaigns. Here’s an opportunity for someone at Twitch sales to DM me and educate me if I’m wrong, but it hasn’t happened in the 5 years of me running ads. I’m still waiting. We’re seeing a decline in Twitch ad sales because ads don’t work on Twitch. At my agency, we’ve run hundreds of ad deals through Twitch. From 2019 -> 2024 we’ve moved almost all our ad budget to other digital platforms. The answer isn’t dramatic as to why, just follow the money. Many brands don’t have the data we have yet and they’ll keep running and testing ads. So Twitch will always get some business. But until Twitch improves their ad systems, ad spend will continue to decline. What about individual streamers being demonetized? First, an important note on streamers in general. You should put literally zero stock into anything an individual content creator says or shows you. This goes double for any “take” or “opinion” they make. I respect many of these men and women for their work ethic and artistic ability to create great stories and content. But they are almost all entertainers. Being a streamer gives you no particular expertise over the industry you’re a part of - your customers are your viewers and you are paid by Twitch. Only a tiny amount of streamers have any business sense. And most of those few just act as the face of a brand and C-level people do the work behind the scenes. You should discount anyone who isn’t actually a practitioner. Valuable resources are actual industry folk, ad tech specialists and buyers, and journalists who have creative integrity and put in work to dig. Talk to any of these people (Richard Lewis/myself/other ad buyers/news outlets) and the consensus is that about eleven major brands have paused ads and the site is declining in overall spending. I wanted to put this above note here because I spend a good amount of time dispelling uninformed opinions made by posers (in my field of focus.) Everyone is trying to be an expert on everything and few people put in real work. Beware people whose bills are exclusively paid by the total attention they get. This incentivizes them towards extreme opinions and to creep into every issue they have no business speaking on. Anyway, individual streamers are getting demonetized because of the new Content Classification Labels that Twitch added. It isn’t related or indicative of the overall ad situation on Twitch. As I predicted in my October thread, CCLs would be Twitch’s first move in response to an advertising boycott. You will see this happen much more to streamers. Streamers will randomly lose ad revenue. Youtube had to go through this during their own adpocalypse. As the tech is built it will miscategorize and mislabel streamers. The simplest version of CCLs is what Twitch just implemented. Twitch just exported a list of polarizing words (“political, Iran”) and categorically demonetized all streamers by those labels. It’s the most braindead implementation of any kind of brand safety measure, which is why you can safely rely on Twitch to do it first. The twitch adpocalypse won’t look like individual streamers getting demonetized. It will look like a 20-50% overall decline in streamer revenue from ads. Twitch won’t be able to keep up with fill rates and ad inventory won’t be as valuable. Fixing this won’t come down to individual streamers (they just aren’t that important, sorry.) It will come down to Twitch’s ad tech improving to become competitive with market leaders such as Adsense and Meta. Twitch has had many years to compete on this level and has thus far failed spectacularly. This reason above all others is why I’m generally bearish on Twitch’s future. Hopefully this thread is comprehensive enough that we have no more confusion about the Twitch ad situation. Please bookmark and send this thread to people if they are trying to understand the Twitch ad system or adpocalypse situation. Thank you for taking the time to read this.

One year ago we had less than 1,000 subs on piped.video/devinnash - thank you everyone for giving me something else to be grateful for this Thanksgiving

This is happening Friday the 15th at 6:00PM PST. Don't miss this one! @Amouranth and I will be deep diving into her amazing journey to becoming one of the top creators in the world. I'm looking forward to this talk and I'm astounded by the progress and impact she's making.

The fearmongering and misdirection about Twitter recently is wild. People are being led to believe that Twitter has become a wild hateful battleground on the verge of destruction. The media is desperate to push that narrative on you without real evidence. Examples below.

Many people are asking me to talk about the Twitch leak. I won't. I don't feel good about covering illegally obtained, private company information. I always try to choose what's right over what's popular. This is one of those times.

Ok ok I'll stop playing Diablo and make a video about the Twitch brand changes but I don't care because I moved 95% of my business to other platforms over 2021 -> 2022 when I warned you all about this in the first place. A leopard never changes its spots.

People don't realize how much more money they could make by diversifying. Understanding how platform revenue splits affect your brand can more than DOUBLE your income by doing the same thing somewhere else. Watch here: piped.video/watch?v=bGvfYv5n…

Absolutely insane numbers on Twitch coming from Grefg. This stream beats LoL Worlds record of 1.7 million viewers for all time at 2.5 million. He represents over 35% of the TOTAL Twitch audience on one stream right now. Historic! Non-English streamers are dominating the platform.

Why the "but it isn't free to play!?" complaints? IMO f2p is a failed model for serious online-only games. Too much cheating. ARC Raiders would be a nightmare as f2p. Instead its priced competitive to Tarkov which seems reasonable for one of the most anticipated games of 2025.

People complaining about Twitch introducing midroll ads either don't read or want something for free. If you don't want ads, pay for Twitch Turbo or sub. If you can't or won't - then you watch ads. That is the transaction for the service Twitch provides. It's how business works.

Add another notch on the track record of consistently smart business decisions by 100 Thieves. CDL is overpriced and unlikely to produce ROI. This is 100% the right move for a company trying to build a business on revenue models that make sense.

It is insane to me that broadcasters can build multi-million dollar content empires and in the same breath do something so blindingly stupid as stream full episodes and movies of AAA titles on Twitch. What a time to be alive. piped.video/watch?v=msCvOEYj…

Thank you, it was the obvious choice. As my first executive action we're opening a new position for Director of Shipping Services. You are welcome to apply!

More broadcasters are moving to Youtube to stream less hours but produce higher quality shows. I've always had mad respect for @LudwigAhgren and can't wait to see what he does at @YouTubeGaming. Excited about how he will further impact FGC and Youtube's streaming culture.

You set the standard for how streamers can change the world. From giving back over $1,000,000 to those in need to this partnership with the phenomenal @YouAreRAD. I can't overstate what a positive step this is for livestreaming culture. May more influencers follow your example.

So, you choose death.

Gambling is damaging to young Twitch users, bad for legitimate advertisers, and brings down the quality of the whole site. It's not about the money. Twitch is just too bureaucratic to take a stand against it. Good people work there, but are corralled by bad leadership.

A predictable but concerning move. I worry people won't see the forest for the trees here. Twitch's decision to unilaterally remove revenue from a content creator's channel without any preamble should be a warning to anyone trying to make a living on the platform.

Removing creators who moved to Youtube from Twitch Recap feels petty. There's no legal justification (AFAIK) and not much of a business reason to do this. Not a great look if your marketing shtick is "we care about our creators." It just feels like a unnecessary burn.

My DMCA Resource Master Guide is live. It informs broadcasters and helps navigate this confusing subject. Google Page Link: bit.ly/DevinDMCAGuidePage Google Doc Link: bit.ly/DevinDMCAGuide Share for awareness!

It's like saying Smoothie King is increasing their prices by 30% because they charge $8 per smoothie to customers. That's not their cost to make a smoothie. They bulk buy ingredients, have deals with suppliers, etc. This justification from Twitch makes no sense.

Then Twitch includes this bizarre paragraph. They use the IVS rates they *charge customers* to justify their expense. But Amazon owns these servers - and these prices are for minimum usage. It would cost Amazon substantially less than they charge customers to run these servers.

He's worried about the site as a whole. You don't stream in a vacuum, you stream in an ecosystem. Your actions effect the whole site in the form of lower CPMs and site-wide concessions to media companies that impact ALL streamers. Weekend reading: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTub…

Announcing nexus.novo.tv - a free resource for content creators to get quality sponsorships. No fees or BS. No exclusivity. All deals done by humans. Intro video: piped.video/oeutOd1xbRA - any size creator on any platform can sign up. Here's why we built it 🧵⬇️

I'm stepping down as owner of Novo, my marketing agency, and divesting my shares/equity back to our founders and the company. This post is to talk about what's next and a little about why. First the Why on Novo: - Scaling the company to where it is now, it's hard to make money ethically and meaningfully. Similar to when I stepped away from talent agency work, we went from making an impact on small businesses trying to change the world to running advertisements for major established companies and government, and there is little soul in that. Novo is a profitable and wealthy agency, but not the one I started and it doesn't make a difference in the world (my main metric for doing anything at all, btw) like it used to. - Significant ethical concerns and disagreements with co-founders. I'll hold back on this one for now, but I might talk about it more later. - I feel like I've attained expertise equal to a very small stratosphere of marketers and there are no more interesting problems to solve here. (same reason I left esports post-franchising) Onto what's next: - I'm going to rejoin the conversation about media, business, tech and world developments via YT and X/Twitter. We live in the most interesting and important time to be alive. Shockingly I've watched for two years but a creator who covers major business, tech, and new media issues in an unbiased way hasn't emerged. These topics require a better class of creator and I'll aspire to be that. I also realized that anything of significance I've ever had in my life has been because of my small part in exploring those issues. My main focus in the foreseeable future is to be outward-facing (more videos, streams, and writing.) - My work in business will probably go one of two ways: - I'll find something or a team I want to contribute to at an executive or advisory level that is doing something important. No plans here yet, but my eyes are open. **Please DM me if you have a project like this you'd like my attention on.** - Exploring a product-based business (probably in tea/health) because product is the one side of business I haven't built a 7 figure company in and it seems fun to try. I'll post a lot more here than I ever did before, so if you're interested in the topics I tend to cover you'll eat well. Otherwise you can always find new videos, streams and updates about me on Discord, Twitch, and Youtube (pinned post here on X.) I appreciate you all and hope you'll welcome me back into the world conversation.

This should raise an immediate red flag. Why is Twitch calling the shots on what is good or bad for your community? None of the data on simulcasting supports this. It's universally healthier for the growth of every broadcaster that tries it.

Overall, streamers should think about a service like Patreon that charges an 8-12% split instead of a 50% one. Twitch's split remains one of the highest of all social platforms. Broadcasters can take home more by diversifying their offerings to more price competitive platforms.

as a marketing guy I'm proud of you for this tweet

Punishing streamers (even if it's just the top 1%) because Twitch can't get its ad program together to recoup those costs feels bad. Subscribers aren't a major Twitch revenue driver so this feels like a weird change.

Twitch could score an easy win by getting rid of gambling once and for all. I gave up a platform (earning $15,000/month) and have turned down MILLIONS of dollars in gambling sponsors directly through my agency. Because evil only thrives when good people stand by and do nothing.

This is the same subreddit that committed to eliminating harassment after a series of the largest wake up calls in gaming industry history. It's barely a month later and everything is back to business as usual. What even changed? Disheartening.

Twitch is undoubtedly expensive to run, but few of those costs are recouped through subs anyway. Because subs always earn Twitch a flat rate - but ads are dynamically priced and their potential scale is infinite. Translation - ads make far more for Twitch than subs ever will.

While I'm hot on this, we shouldn't let the behavior of "gambling addicts" off either. Every streamer is accountable for their own platform. You don't give Sliker a pass because of "gambling addiction." He maliciously scammed dozens of people and ruined lives.

Can anyone give me a single compelling reason to keep Twitch partnership (exclusivity) vs. multistreaming for higher discoverability and diversified monetization?

This isn't an attack on the industry. (@joerogan even acknowledges the professionals later) This is Joe's personal recollection of gaming addiction. The vast minority of people make discernible income from gaming compared to the people who have struggled with it.

I wish more top creators followed this example, rather than the current meta of illegally streaming reactions to movies and TV shows; then giving away $500 of their millions for retweets on Twitter.

not looking good

WOW - @CashApp just dropped $20,000 to the @Trainwreckstv & Scuffed Podcast community. What a way to open up a partnership. Ya'll helped so many people today. Grateful to be working with the @CashApp family.

You're a legend @REALMizkif - thanks for the awesome chat and for teaching me how to dance

Twitch isn't making money off gambling. They're losing on sitewide CPMs. Legitimate advertisers don't want their ads served next to online casino ads. They don't want to support advertising gambling to kids. This decision is costing Twitch in cultural equity and real revenue.

There are still streamers accountable for their own platforms, but they are becoming more rare. That's why I support @Trainwreckstv. He gambles, but his messaging about gambling is clear to everyone. He also funnels hundreds of thousands to mental health and charity.

I made a Master Guide for Mixer Streamers as a result of the shutdown. You can minimize the impact on yourself and your community by being proactive. Google Doc Link: bit.ly/DevinMixerGuide Share for awareness!

So sorry, Emiru. This is unacceptable from Twitch and you should speak to your agency/mgmt regarding legal action. Not only for your own situation but as a lever to force Twitch to keep people safer. Sadly it's the only force function a company this incompetent responds to.

First: sub splits. To earn $100,000/yr from subscribers alone you need 2,380 users subscribed in a Group A Territory (USA, Europe, etc) per month ($8,333/mo or $100,000/yr) - that is beyond the top 1% of partners. About 600 people have those numbers: twitchtracker.com/subscriber…

🤣imagine having a functional programmatic ads system so you can properly reward your creators AND keep your lights on

If ever there was reason to ban someone from a platform, scamming dozens of people and ruining lives with tons of visual proof is it. He tried to get me too BTW, but I've played way too much EVE Online to fall for that one.

Twitch's ability to consistently release features not a single person likes is actually impressive. It's important to know how this system works, so I made this video to breakdown Twitch's new experimental feature to have viewers pay to "boost" streams. piped.video/watch?v=x5gwYF4Q…

Twitch CEO Emmett Shear is retiring. I know everyone is looking for a hot take but the reality is that Emmett hasn't run Twitch in years. If you've seen the company the last 2-3 years, you've seen it under the new CEO Dan. This won't impact Twitch's stagnant atmosphere.

I'm 5 months into not streaming because of Twitch's decisions and I have plenty of eggs to throw. But this isn't the moment for that. Staff who did nothing wrong will work long hours to fix this. Untold security problems loom ahead. I won't be a part of making any of that worse.

Opting out of TwitchCon. What is the cost benefit in losing 2+ weeks to illness? I just don't see the practical point of these conventions unless the organizers do the bare minimum to keep people well.

YOU should call the shots on what's optimal for your community, not Twitch. The real reason is because they know these competitors are a legitimate threat and they don't want you to find out you can do better elsewhere and switch your main platform. It's about market share.

Livestreaming has a strange way of turning people into demagogues and monsters, and it's something I've thought about a long time. Streamers are incentivized to push further and further away from their expertise because a broader audience demands coverage of topical issues instead of niche ones. The same audience rewards "hot takes" and controversy. It pushes a streamer to deeper levels of Dante's Inferno until they don't even recognize themselves anymore. They wake up one day and the content they create is different from their original vision. Now they're fueling the flames of rhetoric that adds more suffering into the world. Lately streamers having been moving out of the content creation space and into the wider world. They're getting equity stake in businesses and profit-generating companies. Their communities are surprised that punishments are different and they note that "other content creators" have different rules apply to them - they don't catch platform-level bans - etc. If it feels like they have different rules it's because this is literally true. Once you employ people, are accountable to advertisers, and have stake in the economy (equity) you are held to a different standard. That standard exists as a subjective but collective agreement that as stakeholders in the future, we have an obligation to speak and do well by other humans. This obligation helps stave off barbarism and suffering. Content creators without this stake are held accountable only by platforms. Because of targeted advertising, platforms can accept all but the most egregious behavior. But in the brand world (the real world) content creators aren't taken seriously. They're talking heads, entertainers, etc. If their opinions are detestable you just don't sponsor them directly and move on. The rules are different for brands, who are accountable to their shareholders and customers. Shareholders and customers that have diverse backgrounds and opinions. When a stakeholder shakes those foundations they turn a brand's focus away from providing value to damage control over opinions and views they don't themselves hold. Simultaneously the stakeholder disrupts that collective agreement and violates the higher standard they've been held to. The responsibility and reward that comes from being a stakeholder in the future is high, and likewise the punishments are more severe. The reason you are seeing more severe responses and punishments now is because streamers are becoming stakeholders. They're becoming part owners in real companies. People are now relying on them to provide a different kind of value. Expectations change. I appreciate when I see self reflection from streamers that understand the importance of all this. I hope it keeps up and they strive to be better. We need more creators who shun the general public's incessant nagging for "the hot take" and to "talk about the drama." Creators who understand they have great influence and can change the world, for good or ill, and choose good. I hope we see an uptick in creators trying to share more positive vibes. And that more realizations come from existing creators to take on responsibility and build a better world. It's needed today more than ever.

I pray this feature doesn't go live due to community feedback. This feels the worst for small streamers who would have to choose between income (donations, subs) and encouraging their viewers to pay for recognition.

If you want to make it as a creative you have to embrace being cringe. Some amount of people will always see your work as cringe. You should take all feedback and criticism seriously and in stride. But don't ever let it stop you from putting your work out into the world. A true loser is a person who thinks nothing, presents nothing, and stands for nothing. They've lost the courage to express their original soul and so they project that self-contempt onto you because you're trying. They'll critique your power to express yourself but never try to gain it themselves because they're terrified of the world. Their singular goal is to shut you off, and turn you into one of them. Don't ever let them; keep creating.

Twitch doesn't pull the trigger for the same reason simple changes take years on the website. The right people don't care. The good people in partnerships and PM positions working hard don't have the corporate clout to push the issue through leadership.

(and if it's not and the whole thing kabooms at least there will be no record that I said this)

First we should actually read the announcement. It says clearly - you still can't multistream/simulcast on any of their competitors they consider long form. (Youtube/Facebook) They say this is to prevent a "sub-optimal experience for your community."

A lame half measure. Influencers will dodge around this using the same tricks that allow Twitch to be an Only Fans funnel. Ban luck-based gambling full stop. The damage it does to audiences is catastrophic and worse for sponsorships sitewide besides.

Obligatory 30 minute Devin Nash video explaining some of the hidden details of this announcement and why it's instructive of Twitch's overall direction -> piped.video/Z1CAGbtIXzg - you all knew it was coming. 🥳

Publishers will never do this. Why would they? It's free promotion for their game and inherently symbiotic. Further, most EULAs already grant this permission to broadcasters. Your tweet is unnecessary scare tactics during a time we ought instead discuss productive solutions.

Unfortunately, there's only one Trainwreckstv out there, and dozens more rats who will abuse the system and their audience for fame and dollars. This is a platform problem, not a people problem. Create the environment for people like that to thrive and they will appear.

I love it

To players and staff affected by the CLG layoffs - please DM me if I can help you develop your resume or connect you with potential adjacent industry positions. I will help as much as I can. Business leaders in the gaming space also please reach out to me if you're hiring.

Read the announcement - "...to prohibit streaming of gambling sites that aren't licensed either in the U.S. or other jurisdictions that provide sufficient consumer protection." What classifies a jurisdiction as "sufficient?" - Twitch doesn't say that gambling itself is banned.

Huge change to Twitch - broadcasters can now DISABLE clips made on their channels. Will streamers use this feature?

Twitch cannot run a business without streamers running ads. Subs and bits don't scale. Ads do. Their business is monetized via brand advertising. For people saying, 'my viewers will miss moments' - run ads during breaks. Twitch does NOT force ads if you run them yourself.

Since I'm getting a lot of messages about our methodology, here's a little of what we did to detect viewbots that I'm confident is difficult for the bot service providers to fight us on: - We checked logged in/logged out user ratios on top streams and compared the % to streams we knew weren't viewbotting. - We put a bot in the top 15,000 Twitch streams and scraped the chat list and chat every 3-5 minutes. From there we used OCR to look for obvious, common botted messages and the accounts that were sharing them across multiple channels. - We also looked as usernames and compared them to botnet lists that bot service providers typically used. - Our conclusions were that most of the top 500 streams were viewbotting with 30-40% of viewers as blatent bots and another 5-15% as embeds. Kind of hilariously all of the above was overkill and anyone with 30 minutes and a brain could see who is viewbotting. The services aren't really trying to hide it and you'll constantly see long lists of "a1111, "a1112, a1113" usernames and common pregen username strings posting "DAMN LOL, [streamer!] WWW" across multiple chats. Any agency doing any amount of due diligence would detect this - but none of them do it because it would impact the passthrough from the money they make from sponsors. I know most people don't read this far down, so this post was for invested folk and nerds. Enjoy.