Change revenue split between streamers and lower payout minimums
I believe these recommendations combined would positively make a huge impact for every streamer and supporter.
Change the payout split between streamers and Twitch. Right now affiliates and most partners only get a 50% split from a Twitch subscriptions ($2.50 USD). I would like to see all streamers get a minimum 70% revenue split from subscriptions with a higher revenue split for all partners 80%. Currently both Facebook and YouTube streamers get a 70% split from subscriptions (and they have the option to create custom subscriber tiers with Youtube).
In addition, I would like to see Twitch lower its payout minimum which is currently $100 USD to $10 - $20 USD. A $100 USD payout is the equivalent to 40 subscriptions not including bits or ad revenue. For the smaller streamers to benefit from that financial support a viewer gives them, they need to be able to actually receive it in a reasonable amount of time.
To put this in perspective: Amazon Affiliates monthly payout minimum is 10 USD (they also give the option to pay out with gift cards) and Patreon's monthly payout minimum is only 3 USD.

Hey everyone -
Firstly, we want to thank SaltyWyvern for posting this request, and the 22k+ of you who have supported it with your votes, comments, and shares. We have been blown away by the response to this post, and have been carefully considering it for the better part of the last year. As there are actually two asks in this post, we will address them individually.
For the primary request of increasing the revenue share split to 70/30, the standard revenue share for subscriptions is 50/50, and we do not have plans to change the standard revenue share. We understand that this is disappointing for many of you, but we’d like to provide some reasoning behind the decision. To quote our President, Dan Clancy, from the blog we posted today:
“When we first established a 50/50 revenue share split, it was to signal that we’re in this together. You all do the amazing work you do to create great content, engage with your audience, and grow communities. On our side of the partnership, it’s our responsibility to make continuous investments in the products and people that make your growth possible.
As you probably heard by now, we’re in the middle of rolling out the largest change to payouts in years by cutting the payout threshold in half to $50. This is an important middle step that will help streamers put money in their pockets now, while getting us closer to our goal of same day payouts and lower thresholds.
Investments like these are paying off for streamers. Products like Prime Subs, Community Gifting, Hype Train, and the Ads Incentive Program, to name a few, have driven an increase of 27% more streamer revenue per viewer hour every year over the last five years. This means the same viewer hour now earns you three times more money than it did five years ago, on average. Our investments into your monetization options have already and continue to put more money into streamers’ pockets than 20% more subs revenue share would have.
Prime Subs often get lost in the conversation when it comes to revenue share. For Prime Subs, we pay streamers the same amount they’d receive for a regular subscription even though it is included as an added benefit of their Prime subscription. Combined with other monetization products, Prime Subs increase your effective revenue share by approximately 15%, to about 65% total. This number varies by streamer size and location, but subscription revenue share is not the full picture on revenue share for streamers.
Lastly, we have to talk about the cost of our service. Delivering high definition, low latency, always available live video to nearly every corner of the world is expensive. Using the published rates from Amazon Web Services’ Interactive Video Service (IVS) — which is essentially Twitch video — live video costs for a 100 CCU streamer who streams 200 hours a month are more than $1000 per month. We don’t typically talk about this because, frankly, you shouldn’t have to think about it. We’d rather you focus on doing what you do best. But to fully answer the question of “why not 70/30,” ignoring the high cost of delivering the Twitch service would have meant giving you an incomplete answer.“
As mentioned above, we recently started a rollout for reducing the minimum payout threshold to $50. Although this does not fully meet the request of $10-20 today, we will continue exploring ways to bring your hard-earned money to you faster, and more efficiently and aim to continue to lower the payout threshold in the future.
While we are declining this request, it’s still crucial to know that the primary value of sharing your feedback on UserVoice is to have your voices heard and suggestions considered. We will not always be able to provide the desired outcome, but it’s important to us to be transparent and open when we can, and we will be focusing on providing more consistent updates on UserVoice as time goes on.
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djtechno95 commented
I am so disappointed with Twitch’s response to this. And them going by the 50/50 split and making unwarranted changes to the Ad Incentive program means things are more financially strained for streamers than they should be. So I suggest we push this further by signing a Change.org petition: https://chng.it/2MR8fKf75m
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Nate_LapT commented
Twitch don't care about ya'll going to kick.
They make money off kick using their services. -
NeoHyperDrive commented
once Kick gets a mobile app, am switching to them, least friends already enjoying 95/5 payout already. Sure im not a huge loss to you guys but still im looking for better choices
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thedabbedcollective commented
They refuse to reissue my payment after they issued it to the wrong place. They say that I need to contact the bank. The bank is a closed institution and no longer exists. I told them this and they said there was nothing they can do! Don't trust Twitch to pay you!
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DjTPK commented
my payouts have dropped by at least 40% since the switch! that borders on robbing the streamer!!!
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lumpbeefrock commented
Absolutely 100% letting you know that if you do this I will find other ways to support the content creators I enjoy.
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DaveSkywalker commented
I still haven't spent a dime in Twitch since this announcement. I send money to streamers via PayPal. Win-win-lose (me-streamer-Twitch). I encourage everyone to do the same. ***** Twitch, not the streamers.
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Wings01 commented
The minimum is better to be 5% of monthly minimum wage of your country, because USD100 is too much for poor countries. Poor country dont have a minimum wage montlhy like that.
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AnyMEmdq commented
This is not "disappointing for many of" us, but for absolutely everyone. Thing is, you claim 200 hs of streaming for 100 CCU costs $1000 (which we all know it's not real, you won't share the real number, and that's ok), but how much money does it produce for you? Sadly month has just change and I cannot bring the exact numbers, but a 100 CCU streamer makes way over that on subs alone in half the time, meaning you make it too, not to mention the 25-40% from bits, and the massive ad-revenue you also get. If you are allegedly investing $1000 (that you are not, you are an Amazon company, you are calling us stupid when you try to sell that you pay full retail price for what you described as "essentially Twitch video") every 200 hs for 100 CCU, it means you are making at least $5000 on top of that from subs alone.
On the other hand, half the tools you develop are either pointless or useless (like highlighting everyone in chat, or ruining the "about" section, or the new and useless "cue" to pester viewers into following, stolen from the Nightbot timers many streamers have), and the ones that work are 100% dependent on the viewers spending more money, and makes you the same increase in revenue share, so while you claim this "improvements" were made to increase revenue for streamers, they gave the same percentile increase on revenue to you, in regards to subs, and even higher in regards to ads (as the streamer share for ads was pitiful, and this was a desperate attempt to make us turn them on, because most streamers didn't play ads at all, so while your ad share is now lower, the amount of ads viewed skyrocketted), so don't try to sell it as if you are running a charity, because you aren't. In the last couple of years you've invested way more money into trying to circumvent adblocks (that are only used by like 10% of the viewership or less, and in blaming them when you break the platform and even subs and prime users start seeing extra ads, to the point of even banning people talking about it on platforms like reddit), than in any change to help streamers grow (which have been close to non-existent, with only the sad attempt of the Boost Train, that streamers had no control of, being worth mentioning, and the abherration that was your attempt to SELL us a place in a featured page).
And let's not forget that a big chunk of the "quality" improvements for viewers you've made overtime have been stolen from plugins, bots and addons, like animated emotes and the point system.
As for Prime subs, based on data from about 50 channels of different sizes I work with, we are talking about 1-3% of the total sub count, so for every $75-250 streamers make you, you get $2.5 less. Not to mention more than half the viewers don't have Prime, more than half of those that have it don't use twitch, and those who use it often forget, as it needs to be renewed manually every single month. You said it yourself, ALL the monetization products COMBINED increase the streamer's share by 15-65% total, and Prime subs represent 1-3% of that increase, that's on average way closer to 15 than to 65%.
You think force-feeding us this BS will make us say "poor guys, they are losing money"? Because that's what you are trying to sell RN, and we ain't buying. Do you know what every middle-size streamer will always say? "The worst problem about twitch if that you can't grow, you need to bring the people in from a different platform." Don't believe me? Ask any Partner on the small-side of the spectrum. Yes, I said partner, not affiliate. If a 20-50k followers partner sees this issue, imagine how real it is for an affiliate.
So streamers bring the people, streamers keep the people, streamers bring the revenue, and twitch brings instability to the platform due to trying to chase adblockers and stolen ideas. The pandemic lockdown is over, there's less people now. For everyone. And there's more and more platforms, smaller and larger, trying to sway communities. This whole things is basically "we'll be spending even less money on creators paychecks and forcing them to run more ads so we get even more money on top of that." I could describe it as a win-win situation for twitch, but meaning they win twice "we win once by paying you less, and we win again by making you sell stuff for us" and all while trying to convince us this is good for us!
And one final thought: If you keep 50% of the sub revenue "to signal that we’re in this together," why don't we have equal say?
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taibu commented
You "have been carefully considering it" and come to the conclusion, you won't make it better nor leave the share at it is, no, you decide to make it worse overall. I highly disagree, that the key factors to the success of Twitch today is split 50/50 between the platform and the streamer. And the compensation is more ads, after Prime is not ad-free anymore. All other platforms make profit with better shares and they have infrastructure costs, too. Your statement doesn't make any sense. Not empathy wise nor long term business wise.
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chrisxodash commented
Wow this is such a bummer. Twitch, do you actually care about streamers and viewers? I'm going to switch to Youtube with my favorite streamers in literally NO time.
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ASMRPunk commented
It's called compromise. We see your justification, but we don't care. We should be able to come to some type of middle ground and the ad incentive program does not seem like an appropriate step in the right direction. We don't feel like we're in this together because a partnership should be a two way street. I would bet my years revenue that creators put in more time and effort then twitch does. 22 thousand people is significant, and you said no. The people who work tirelessly just to afford to live and only receiving 50% from there total efforts. If you invest in your creators, You will gain more creators, and thus more viewers. Not to mention that a higher revenue split would generate a powerful incentive for current creators to work even harder. This is an issue that will not disappear.
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DcSensai commented
we have fansly already memeing on it. im surprised facebook and youtube havent arleady sent you all gift baskets. is it going to take one of your bigger names to jump ship and make it public before you realize twenty percent of something is better than fifty percent of nothing.
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Lazagna42 commented
Well, I was considering moving to YouTube, but this has sealed the deal. I am a very small streamer and I am not able to get any of my money out of Twich because I haven't even made $50.00 yet. I only stream 1 day a week if I can even get that, so bye bye Twitch.
Everyone who is leaving Twitch should let them know why so they understand their business practice of pooping on the little guys (and big guys now too) SUCKS!
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xxpsykosnipezxx commented
It’s ******** and twitch doesn’t care at all I might switch to YouTube instead
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Gnuppel commented
And how ridiculous can you please be to disable the button ...
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Gnuppel commented
What a ******** justification. Simply more money in their own pockets. I will cancel all my subscriptions when the upcoming changes come into effect. What does Twitch do for a 50/50 share? The reasoning on costs are absolutely ridiculous. To expect prices for standard users ... laughable. On the contrary, Amazon contributes nothing to the network infrastructure, which they use for free like Youtube & co. The whole thing is paid for by us.
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jana_296 commented
I very much hope that with the new 50/50 conditions, many streamers will no longer put up with it and switch to other streaming providers. To say that twitch and the streamer are equally involved in the streamer's success is outrageous enough but then to say over 22k people campaigned for a 70/30 share and in the same vein to offer 'equality' to all except a few really big streamers is complete rubbish. That has nothing to do with an equal pay for all streamers.
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XansQ42 commented
70:30 for all will be the more air move
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fml1989 commented
This ain't it. Twitch, it was a great time but you guys are ruining the platform with the corporate greed. Tell your business managers to go away and do something with stocks on wall street or something, instead of trying to pressure out some money from creative people.
Also if you would actually have a high resolution input and output, I would believe your claims with the cost being +1000 USD. It is ridiculous to be capped to 5-6mbit/s upload. I still am waiting for the day, where I will have a lag free and compression artefact free video feed from twitch.