Our Plans for 2024: An Open Letter from Twitch CEO Dan Clancy
The last year has been an exciting time for me since I took on the role of CEO at Twitch. The highlight of that year has been the time that I’ve spent with the Twitch community, whether it is in person at events such as TwitchCon or online while streaming. What is clear to me in all of my interactions is that Twitch is a unique service and the passion that each of you have for Twitch is truly special.
The communities that each of you work to build and nurture are the foundation of our service. Building a community takes time and commitment. For Twitch, livestreaming is not a hobby or something that we do on the side. We focus on creating a service where your viewers can pull up a chair and spend time with you as you let them into your lives. Our priority is to continue to be the best community-centric live streaming service. To do that we need to continue to invest in Twitch so that it can evolve and this letter gives an early peek at some of the things we are doing in 2024 to help improve the service to better meet your needs. This isn’t a 100% comprehensive list, but I’m excited to share where Twitch is heading, and I hope it inspires you to keep doing what you do best.
Helping you Grow your Communities
In 2023, we improved many of our existing products to be more effective for you. We made it easier to reach new viewers on other services with the Clip Editor and our updated simulcasting policy, giving you the freedom to stream on any service you like. We improved clip discovery with Featured Clips and launched a new way to keep you and your communities connected with Twitch stories. Finally we focused on improving Stream Together, making collaborative streaming easier than ever.
This year, we’re prioritizing ways to help you grow and stay connected with your community with discovery and collaboration products and improved mobile experiences.
Share Your Content On Social Media
Sharing clips of your content on other social media sites is a great way for new viewers to find you and can help you stay connected with your community. We’ll make it easier for streamers and viewers to share clips to social media, including an option to export Clips directly to Instagram, and enabling you to create on-the-go with Clip Editor on mobile.
Making Collaborations Easier & More Rewarding
Collaborations are one of the best ways you can grow and reach new audiences as a streamer. This year we’re going to continue to make them easier, more fun, and more rewarding for you. We’ll be improving Stream Together, which is currently in beta and lets up to six streamers go live together on their own channels. We’re making it easier and more intuitive to get set up, and to spontaneously find and collaborate with other streamers on Twitch. We’ll also be adding ways to merge chats and combine viewership so you can create unique and fun cross-community moments together with other streamers.
Improving the Twitch Mobile Experience
Mobile viewing is an important way for viewers to stay connected with the streamers and communities they care about. We’re redesigning the mobile app (the first major update since 2019) to bring you a more modern, immersive viewing experience by making the discovery feed available to all Twitch users as the new landing experience in the app. The discovery feed, currently a limited experiment, is a scrollable feed of live streams or clips with filters to help you quickly see the latest from streamers you follow and discover new content, even when you only have a few minutes to spare.
As part of our investment in mobile, we’ll be adding new features to stories on Twitch to make it easier to share quick updates with your community beyond your stream. We’re adding the ability to create and upload short video stories and rolling out updates you’ve been asking for, including pinch-to-zoom for photos and making portrait clips available to share to stories.
We want to make it easier for viewers to support their favorite streamers on mobile. To do this, we are rebuilding the way users can purchase subscriptions, gifts and Bits to create a better experience on mobile devices. We’ll also make mobile-specific improvements to features like Hype Train so that they’re optimized for mobile.
Finally, until now many of our mod tools have been available on desktop only, a real limitation to keeping your communities safe. Our mod tools should be flexible, easy to use, and move with you. Later this year, we plan to roll out Mobile Mod View on iOS, to make it easier to mod from wherever you are.
Helping you Make More Money
Over the past year, we’ve made a number of changes to help you make more money on Twitch. We launched and recently expanded the Plus program (formerly the Partner Plus program) to give qualifying streamers higher revenue shares, which helped triple the number of streamers earning premium revenue shares. We also made the Ads Incentive Program more flexible and easier to manage, and created new display ad formats and improved tooling to make the ads experience less disruptive. We’ve created a sustainable, transparent framework for streamer compensation that we’ll expand upon this 2024 to help you reach your goals.
Fueling More Creator Sponsorships
In 2023, we built channel skins, sponsored discount subs, host read ads, and more. We got great feedback on our pilot sponsorship activations from both brands and streamers. In 2024 our focus is on expanding the number of brands we are working with and bringing new sponsorship opportunities to more streamers.
New Incentives to Encourage Support
In 2024, we’ll create new milestones and rewards that your community can unlock by cheering, gifting, or subscribing. We’re planning improvements to Hype Train including updating rewards regularly, and are trying new types of interactions with Bits to evolve Cheering. You can also expect some new Alerts features. Lastly, we’ll build on the success of SUBtember and the end of year Bonus Round by expanding our Twitch-wide promotional events to help you earn more.
Increasing Sub Prices
We announced changes to the Prime Gaming Sub revenue payouts in January, which gave us the ability to increase sub pricing in select markets so that streamers can take home more revenue to keep pace with rising costs. We increased the price of Tier 1 subs in Australia, Canada, and the UK, and raised the price of all subs in Turkey–the first time we’ve raised sub prices since their inception. We anticipate raising sub prices in some additional countries later this year. We’ll make sure to give you plenty of notice before we introduce additional changes in this area.
Keeping Your Communities Safe
Safety continues to be a top priority for all of our teams. We want you to feel safe on our service, and feel empowered to create. Throughout 2023, we rolled out products and policies designed to better protect you from harm. We focused on improving our existing mod tools and introduced new features like our Batch Reporting Tool and Shared Mod Comments. We made Shield Mode easier to use and more powerful by integrating it into Mod View and adding support for Twitch Alerts. We also made key improvements to our safety policies, to better ensure they meet the needs of our community. We expanded the scope of our Off-Service Conduct policy, for example, adding doxxing and swatting to the list of behaviors we’ll enforce against, recognizing that harm that takes place outside of our service has a big impact on our own Twitch community.
Reducing Harassment
We’ll continue our work to combat harassment on Twitch. Throughout 2023, we conducted user surveys, met with creators around the world, and reviewed the tools and policies we use to prevent harassment on Twitch. Our goal was to better understand how harassment is experienced on our service, and uncover gaps in our own policy and product approaches. This year, we’ll roll out updates to our Community Guidelines, including clearer, updated harm definitions, and more severe penalties for some types of harassment. We’re also building tools to better identify harassment across our service, including changes that would block more harassment before it shows up in your chat.
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Updating our Enforcement System
We regularly get questions about suspensions – how long of a suspension is applied after a particular Community Guidelines violation, and whether they expire, for example. We want to ensure that when someone breaks our Community Guidelines, the suspensions we issue match the severity and seriousness of the harm. We also recognize that some suspensions shouldn’t stick around forever, like violations of our lower-severity policies, which cover non-malicious or accidental behaviors that aren’t likely to result in serious physical or emotional harm. Including a drug-related term in your username is an example. We’re working to ensure we’re enforcing our Community Guidelines fairly and will have more to share soon.
There’s a lot to be excited about in 2024. We’re focusing on the products, tools and programs to help you build your communities and make it more rewarding, fun, and safe. The list above includes just a portion of some of the things we are working on for 2024 and we look forward to sharing more over the course of the year.
In addition to our efforts to improve the Twitch service, we also are focused on continuing to improve how we engage and communicate with the Twitch community. We have received very positive feedback about the live streams following big announcements and we plan to continue to develop programs such as Patch Notes to provide you regular insight into the work that we are doing. Personally, I am planning on continuing to travel around to meet with streamers across the globe. These interactions are invaluable in helping me understand many of the challenges that you face and it helps with exploring new ideas and areas of exploration for the service.
Thank you for choosing to go live on Twitch and enriching our community with your creativity. We’re excited to continue to build our service together.
