How Twitch Holds Back Streamers (What They DON'T Want Affiliates and Partners to Know)

so if he wanted any argument against the kind of inherent evilness of this practice you have it right there the fact of the matter is twitch didn't pay anybody anything for being on this platform until they had to let's talk about something that I've wanted to talk about for a while which is this issue of twitch exclusivity so I guess there's nothing to be done about this topic really but like in a sense of like a problem that we can fix but I want to make more people aware of it because it's one of the the bigger issues on twitch that I think doesn't get talked about enough so at the very least I think this could be like a pretty productive video and we could like we could we could make some progress here so there's also like a lot of like really interesting things in this that a lot of people don't know and this in this talk okay so I'm gonna do that now so when I say when I'm going to talk about twitch exclusivity as is this subject today so twitch exclusivity let's explain it first so there are major streaming platforms right we'll say their twitch mixer Facebook and YouTube as of right now officially for all partners and affiliates on twitch the official rule is you can't upload any content to any other website within 24 hours of its production on Twitch and you exclusively stream to twitch and you can't stream anywhere else so this first thing means that if I so if I make this a video tomorrow and I upload it that's technically against the Terms of Service and it can be it can be banned so before I get into this topic I think I need to actually there's there's some the problem is this isn't clearly outlined in the in the partner contracts and some contour are different so let's check what it actually says for affiliates so the twitch affiliate agreement is for any live or audio-visual work you do your live content starting for the beginning of the initial broadcast or any such live content continuing for a period of 24 hours live content is exclusive to twitch you will not permit any third party to broadcast stream distribute it or otherwise make available any live content in this manner now I was saying if we're going to have the right to make any live content available during the expo stivity part of soviet which services so right there affiliates are also basically saying that you can only broadcast or stream live exclusively to twitch after the exclusive period or any live content the license to such will become non-exclusive you have a right to broadcast stream and distribute exhibit and otherwise make available so my understanding of like what this means is I guess this has never really been tested it's it's objectively bad if you multi stream which is where all the value is for affiliates you can't you can't do that so that's against the affiliate agreement you can't multi stream so I can't stream - mixer and twitch at the same time as an affiliate um but what I can do is I can go to 24 hours later and steam on mixer but on twitch I can't even do that okay and so like the whole subject here is why I want to talk about that because multi-streaming is actually one of the most powerful forms of marketing that you can do so a and twitch limiting this is is a really big factor as to why twitch has the market share it does and why they've been able to hold on to that market share is this exclusivity for partners and affiliates so now that we've like to establish like what the rules are we kind of discussed that like interestingly on all other platforms out of all of them twitches the only people that do this for all their partners Facebook actually for most Facebook partners allows you to multi stream YouTube doesn't have like an official stance on it but doesn't like really care and mixer also doesn't have like a really official stance twitch is the exception would be for all their bigger content creators so obviously people like ninja and shroud those people are on separate contracts but I'm talking for the vast majority of us just partners and affiliates that that are on these platforms that this is this affects them so the reason why this is important is because if you wanted to stream to let's say like twitch and YouTube and mixer at the same time you actually get a lot of benefits to this to do this right so the first benefit you get is you have 3x to the discovery and audience and that's right that's really powerful the second thing you have is you have 3x to the potential brand power and staying power if one platform fails and also three different 3x different opportunities for your brand to resonate with separate demographics and cultures so there are programs like restream do which I think is the most common one and what what this does is it allows you to broadcast to 30 different websites at once for a pretty low price so doing this is objectively good like there's no streamer that would not want to do this because you could because doing this allows you it'sa basically takes no extra work but gets you exposed to a bunch of other communities and there's a lot of people who are not succeeding on mixer that would maybe succeed on YouTube and a lot of people on YouTube that are not succeeding on YouTube that might succeed on Twitch and a lot of people on Twitch that might succeed on mixer or YouTube right so what twitch is what twitch is doing by holding people to exclusivity in my personal non-attorney non-legal opinion is is is illegal I think I think if this were actually challenged in court I don't think you could hold people to exclusivity for content if you are if they're not employees of your organization and from everything that I know based on dealing with this problem in in eSports which was around exclusivity of players just very similar they're both talent and both have it was we figured out that if that really went to court and this is one of the interesting this is one of the reasons why food versus phase was very interesting right was because um one of the things that teeth was sought to do was try to make it non-exclusive for players to belong in eSports teams and that and to be classified as legitimate talent like you have to be in sports I don't think a state like California where twitch does business would hold this up but again I I want to make for purposes of this talk I'm not an attorney I'm not a legal counsel I don't have this is my own personal opinion I've worked in the industry with talent I currently do I I don't have it I don't have a lawyers depending on this they're far more intelligent people that you can go off of to get this tank but the problem is that nobody individually or even as a group could ever challenge Amazon to any kind of class action or any kind of call out on this because Amazon's and twitch resources are so vast on this issue so III think that the exclusivity doesn't hold up for me because we are not employees of twitch especially as an affiliate but but um and so to get that likeness and that exclusivity via a blanket agreement for no monetary compensation besides the right to use the platform which has monetary compensation on it but in it of itself you're not getting paid or anything or have any kind of deliverables or exchange for that I think feels probably unenforceable but the problem is that it's never going to be able to be unforced because the because nobody's gonna challenge it so exclusivity is something that people like California really really don't like because especially with people that are independent contractors icees or people that are affiliated in some way because exclusivity is an extremely powerful thing there's a in legal terms there's a thing called a likeness clause okay and I like this kind of just means like who you are your personality your brand your ability to represent yourself if you guys have ever seen like shroud on like monster wasn't he on Monster energy drinks was he on was it this where he was and or who was on who was the gamer that was on the monster energy drink or this is my oh yeah I'm sorry I was thinking madrenas so here you go so anything like this where it's shroud on like a madrenas coffee require an agreement between the broadcaster and the company to give away what's called your likeness clause so your likeness clause for individual influencers or Talent actually I think this is I if I provide you any value and you're an influencer considering being actually no actually if you're anybody if you're working a job whatever your likeness and your personality and your the ability for you to be featured somewhere or shown somewhere or images of you is the most valuable leveraging tool that you usually have in a negotiation so there are different ways to define likeness in legal terms you can define it in in perpetuity which means forever this is the most extreme example of that and you have a lot of instances of players signing this away to organizations without any kind of like compensation and you have it first fixed amounts of time and to varying degrees only like so only audio only face etc so celebrities sell their likeness for things for tens of millions of dollars right I mean it's just insanely valuable people that when I was criticizing the face contracts one of the reasons why I I was like so ass pained about the face contracts was because face literally had a clause in there that said we own your likeness in perpetuity forever across all times dimensions and universes and galaxies like it literally it literally a cup accommodated for space travel like when we invent space when we have like other planets we live on like we still own you there like it was like it was that ridiculous this is not like a meme it literally said that so like so like this is extremely powerful and for twitch owning this kind of exclusivity is really powerful because they not only have the ability to use any partner affiliate so if you ever go to like we can probably do it now but if we go to Twitch's twitter right they'll have some compilation of somebody doing a like they'll usually have some like compilation of like yeah like this where you have a bunch of streamers right that they can feature for their social media and stuff so you'll see like random streamers featured here so I'll sensibly this looks pretty cool it's like oh god twitch is like featuring his constant critters but they're not actually giving the content creators anything for this they're not paying anything for this they already own it so they just take it if you're on their platform they just own your content and no matter how big you are right you can get I've even been on the twitch Instagram page for my from one clip I had on subnautica actually and so like all these streamers right they're not getting anything in compensation for that they're just they're just being featured and the argument might be well Devin like they're being featured they're getting here in media right that's really cool but what I want you to understand is that in every other industry this would be compensated in every other industry like if let's say that this was not twitch but this was razor that was featuring this person there would have been some agreement there would have been some kind of there would have been some kind of transaction there would have been some kind of monetary value that's associated with that if you want somebody to feature a product or service on razor you would you would you would have some kind of deal associated with that so um and then the fact of the matter also is that this doesn't really earn people followers right like this is like this is basically just for twitch to market their platform now I'm not saying that every single person should be compensated or whatever or like or I'm not like trying to make that argument I'm just trying to show you the problem here which is that basically twitch is taking something that is extremely valuable and is and is also exponentially valuable right it's more valuable to the bigger you get and they're there they're just taking it with no argument and no compensation and no way to stop it like you're literal only answer is to not stream on twitch that's all you can do so the exclusivity thing is a problem for two reasons it's a problem not only because you are not allowed to multi stream to other platforms and for partners this is a problem because like for partners imagine if you're banned on Twitch well like every like like if you're banned on Twitch and your entire brand is there all of your phone your notifications everything you lose everything right like you're just done and it's a it's to me it's extremely unethical of twitch to hold part to exclusivity and then simultaneously be willing to like completely like there's no suspensions your account is gone everything that you had is gone all of your notifications all of your followers all of your subscribers everything is gone so to ban somebody on twitch and then expect them to exclusivity that you're guaranteeing that their career is single-handedly on twitch but if they had had ability to stream to mixer and YouTube and Facebook all that time at least they could be like well I also have followers on Facebook I have followers on YouTube I have people there I can continue my brand so this is one of the reasons why I recommend to small business people or influencers or anybody really that like it's the literal don't put your all of your eggs in one basket because if one person can shut you down like that that's so dangerous right like you really want to think about having multiple income sources and ways that you build your brand because it's just so dangerous whereas like if you were able to stream to multiple platforms you wouldn't have this happen and for affiliates the problem is that it reduces growth right because it's objectively better for an affiliate to get discovered through multiple different platforms they have a much higher chance of being discovered simultaneously on the on mixer YouTube Facebook at the same time as they do on Twitch and so to hold somebody to exclusivity for four affiliates also feels bad because it makes it so much harder to grow then when you finally do have the opportunity to have a partner your entire brand is but in twitch so twitch is creating this ecosystem of farming talent where they literally where they literally grow you to the point of like your maximum and then they can just ban you and you completely and you're completely gone and there's nothing you can do and this kind of thing bothers me a lot when I think about it because it seems to me like it's like almost like a farm right like they start you they start you off very young you have 1 to 5 viewers then they bring you in as an affiliate which is extremely easy to do you you're limited in growth purposefully that your only channel is to grow on twitch basically now you can do third-party media but you're not encouraged to do that by anybody at twitch there's no education that teaches you to do that right literally the only show on Twitch that actually talks about any kind of legitimate marketing is my show I'm the only person that does it so like me telling you to go make YouTube videos right you'll never see that in any of the resources that twitch offers creator camp and for that fact matter we could get into the was probably something that I should I should probably talk about at some point is that twitches educational system is abysmal for streamers right the only thing that actually exists is something that most of you probably have never heard of its called creator camp for twitch and we could do a whole nother separate talk on how bad this is and how completely ineffective it is to teach influencers how to grow so as an affiliate you basically get brought in immediately with 1 to 5 viewers you're taught that twitch is going to be the place where you can you can grow you'll you'll find out very quickly that you can't grow on twitch but you but one way to grow might be to actually 4 or 5 X your broadcasts so that you're on 4 or 5 different platforms at once that you can build a following but there's no way to do that because twitch them limits you this exclusivity but what say that you actually succeed somehow and you progress through affiliate to partner well now your entire brand has been on Twitch because that's all you've actually done is built a following there for that entire period of time so now if you get banned on Twitch you're completely hosed because you've been in that funnel the entire time and you haven't been able to to put your brand anywhere else so so twitch creates this system where they make people completely reliant on them but then they have a they have an entirely draconian way of limiting people if you do end up getting banned you do you end up getting restricted from the platform we've given talks about Twitch's banned system in my opinion most of Twitch's banned system is fair but this this still creates an ecosystem that can be profoundly negative for the people involved in it because of the way that it's set up from the ground floor ok so all that said why is twitch doing this well twitch has an enormous incentive to do this because what happens if twitch streamers start broadcasting simultaneously on mixer and on twitch and then they start growing more successful communities on mixer that's gonna look really bad also twitches market share disappears and evaporates overnight if they lose exclusivity because people can stream to multiple different platforms anybody that's like saying would do this it costs no extra resources on the hand of the streamer so the Ulta and and so third you're starting to see especially in the last couple of days with lyric and dr. Lupo and Tim the tap man that twitch is actually now having to pay for this exclusivity so if he wanted any argument against the kind of inherent evilness of this practice you have it right there the fact of the matter is twitch didn't pay anybody anything for being on this platform until they had to when mixer and Facebook and YouTube started started getting Talent now all of a sudden you see lyric and Tim the tap man and dr. Lupo getting cash deals but this is a big problem right because what about all the other partners so the only way that you get a cash deal or any kind of recompensation from what's from twitch is if you're big enough and if you're threatening enough and you can actually fight them on the exclusivity and that's what these other streamers did and some of them moved right like shadow ninjas that right moved because the deals were better and because twitch didn't have a system in place to pay for these people yet they weren't ready so now twitch is giving some of its content creators millions of dollars and then simultaneously not giving this other content creators who are just as large nothing because they know they don't have leverage to move yet so what's happening is top content creators can either negotiate for paid contracts if they have the leverage to say that they're they're gonna be able to go to mixer or Facebook or whatever or they're they're screwed and now twitches playing favorites with paid contracts and is paying for the same exclusivity that they literally and deliberately took from every partner in affiliate for the last eight years and it's so like having a having an idea of how kind of just like think about it and step back and really think about that that's a that's pretty busted I think so III don't know like if we get into like the the ethics of it I don't necessarily know that as CEO of twitch that I would do anything different from this right it's a very effective marketing strategy it gets you a lot of market share quickly and allows you to hold on to it but I think that driving awareness to this issue would would be productive because I don't I think this is out of all the things that twitch does III think this is probably the worst for partners in affiliates and the most egregious at least because like it affects on the twitch band system right very few partners are ever going to be affected by bands they're probably never going to have a case where they're affected by a band statistically but every single partner is affected by this and yet we talk about it a lot less every single partner and affiliate on the platform is affected by this and you're affected as a consumer because you don't actually get to choose where you go for your content like you have to be here and so luckily twitch has made a pretty good platform for now but if you look at like something like Facebook where like the main criticisms are like of the UI and such and like if Facebook exclusively drove a streamer there then like people be upset if they have to use that platform so more options are always better than less for consumers twitch is kind of effectively in my opinion created a monopoly with us and it's it's something that I don't think is going to change but just it is pretty unfortunate so I think a twitch will never we could talk about what's gonna happen and that's why I like for this talk I've basically just set this up to be a awareness talk because I don't I don't think that anything's gonna actually change I don't which will not willingly drop this exclusivity and we're gonna enter a really weird ecosystem in this couple of months where some people are getting paid like isn't it kind of weird that it's like you're su up you take two streamers both have around eleven thousand subs and fifteen thousand concurrent viewers but one is streaming on Twitch for free and one is streaming for twitch under a Cox ku civet II contract worth one plus million a year that's the situation we're about to enter into that's what just happened with Tim the tap man lyric and Lupo they got cash contracts but they're not that like they're not even the biggest streamers so like it just it just it's so weird because like where's xq C's contract where's Tyler won right where's yogscast osman gold KO carnage some of these people may have cash deals but not all of them do it in like whereas kripp right like way and then for that matter like where are the people way at the bottom like where's the people that like what where do you draw the line why do some people get preferential treatment others don't if you take a let's talk about top 200 broadcasters talking about top 500 broadcasters right like at what point do you do you like there's there's an enormous inconsistency here there's there's gonna be some people that are providing the exact same value to twitch that are that are getting paid and some people that are not and exclusivity deals apply across the board to every partner in affiliate but someone like me who gets I don't know you know anywhere between like half to a viewers is never going to get offered an exclusivity contract right and but I'm bound to the same rules so I just I just don't like I just don't I just don't think it's I I just think there's a lot of problems this system and I know that twitch is not gonna fix it but that's why I'm bringing this to people's attention that um and I guess there's nothing else to do because there's nothing we can do but talk about it but I but I think it's an important issue to consider the the only fix that's reasonable is enough people actually get together and see if this is enforceable but it's just never gonna happen Facebook for example like doesn't really hold anyone except its largest people that they pay to exclusivity so if you like if that kind of platform took market share then you could get a situation where Facebook was like the weeding platform and nobody had this problem so yeah I guess I guess it's just like my my duty here was to explain this unfortunately we can't actually do anything about it so for people that are multi assuming there are people that are say in chat you can multi stream if you aren't an affiliate you sure can but the then realize the transaction there is twitch saying hey you can't use the features of our website like subs and don't and and bits and whatever or our subs are what's the other one basically subs and like I think bits or whatever you can't use those features of our website unless you're willing to do exclusivity and that's not how like a transaction works right like if I have something of value then you have to give me something of value back for it so I guess my entire argument with this sort of twitch exclusivity thing is that they're basically taking an enormous amount of value from us for nothing right they get nothing that we get nothing in return having like subscribers are a thing that should be on a platform anyway and you shouldn't lock features behind a paywall so that you can force people into an exclusive contract with you I think that's pretty messed up I understand the business reason for doing it but I just wanted to create awareness towards this happening because a lot of the problems that we have with twitch right now would go away if we were allowed to do light like restricting content to a platform let's like what like a corollary to this would be a what if you could only post your YouTube videos on YouTube the only reason why people don't see this as a problem is because YouTube owns like 90% of the market but if a lot of people watch videos on Facebook a lot of people watch videos on Instagram what if YouTube said hey you guys can't actually post anything that is on YouTube even clips of it on any other platform we only want it to be on YouTube and then they started DMCA and people for content that they created on other places that would be really messed up that's the equivalent here if I multi stream on Twitch i get banned on twitch as a partner if i if i multi stream to mixer tomorrow i get banned on twitch so so they're literally willing to enforce exclusivity right um and I'm not sending I'm not giving them I'm not getting anything in value for that I'm trading my likeness only for the right to be here on on a supposedly free platform that's not fair and we already discussed like what the what the problems are with it with affiliates and how like affiliates are basically funneled into one channel because you should you could you can grow as an affiliate in one direction and then you are only as an affiliate streaming on this platform then once you've grown into a partner status well now you're completely on the twitch platform and you can't go anywhere else so that's just my thoughts on this subject I don't again unfortunately because anything to like do okay it's just like it's probably gonna be a problem for years to come as long as switch has significant market share it's just just what it is although if there's anything else we want to talk about it I guess I want to provide like some kind of value so the the the solution here if you're a content creator is to diversify your platforms right so if you're an influencer the number one thing you should be doing is not living on a single platform the this is incredibly dangerous to live on a single platform because your your potential and whether it be YouTube or twitch or Twitter or wherever your entire livelihood is dependent on that platforms right now in the current climate companies are companies and their enforcement policies are sole judge during an executioner so I don't think that it's worth becoming an affiliate for most people that are just starting out and most people should diversify across multiple platforms the other option is that individual broadcasters and influencers could possibly negotiate with twitch on these exclusivity causes but that's again that would only be like really big people it still affect the vast majority of partners and affiliates but you'd have to have negotiating power to make any kind of difference of that but the default contracts come with it so like pretty much everybody on the platform except for like a very few people either on like really old contracts or people that have some kind of like unique thing they're they're gonna be affected by this I kind of want I guess like the the thing I would think about or the thing that I would hope for is I'd really like more platforms to become more successful because if mixer and Facebook and YouTube actually got significant marketing like market share they could like then like eventually twitch would have to get pressured into doing this like they'd have to get pressured into lowering exclusivity clauses so so basically like more competition and more [Music] [Music]

Channel: Devin Nash

Views: 237,166

Keywords: DevinNash, Devin nash, Influencer, Self Improvement, Twitch, Twitch Exclusivity, Twitch partner, twitch affiliate, influencer marketing, twitch affiliate program, self improvement motivation, game streaming, Twitch Contract, Exclusivity contracts, live streaming, advice for new twitch streamers, twitch advice, do twitch streamers make money, mistakes new streamers make, game streaming service, twitch tv, twitch contracts, twitch partner contract, twitch affiliate agreement

Id: ByI_AodjDf8

Length: 29min 45sec (1785 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 20 2019