Twitch is the most popular streaming platform with more than 240 million users right now. Two weeks ago, word got out that the platform has demonetized various channels out of the blue and reduced Ad-income massively which resulted in massive declines in ad revenues for them all.
People have now started labeling it as the Twitch Adpocalypse. But what exactly is this ongoing Twitch Adpocalypse and why did it happen? Let’s get to the bottom of it with some straight and real facts in this blog.
What Is Twitch Adpocalypse?
According to various credible reports, multiple Twitch streamers reported during the last 3 weeks that their ad revenue has taken a huge hit. Potentially, it is being said that some big advertisers, like Chevron, have limited their ad spend and started to distance themselves from the platform and its inefficient policies to regulate the content it allows, particularly over the recent antisemitism allegations.
This has caused a major decline in the ad revenues of some prominent content creators. The crisis has hence been dubbed as the Twitch Adpocalypse (adpocalypse is an internet slang that refers to the issue where marketing spend on a platform gets reduced drastically).
Why Did Twitch Adpocalypse Happen?
Just last month, Twitch was forced to issue an apology for not letting users from Israel and Palestine sign up for an entire year due to the ongoing conflict. This was probably done so that users from those regions can’t upload any graphic content on the website. Obviously it came across as if Twitch was restricting freedom of speech for some people.
What swiftly followed this controversy was an even bigger one when it was claimed that Twitch supports antisemitism by allowing anti-semitic remarks to go live unfiltered on the platform. A prominent journalist Richard Lewis then reported that some big marketing advertisers have now stopped spending on the platform over such allegations.
This issue was highlighted to such extent that Twitch took action and banned the use of the word “Zionist” in an insulting manner and also added a few labels and categories like “Politics and Sensitive Social Issues” to their content classification labels.
Now those streamers who had this category selected for their content without using any relevant stream tags saw a drastic drop in their ad revenue because advertisers haven’t chosen this category yet for a considerable ad spend, like they did before.
Hence, the bottom line is: Twitch has probably opted to remove ads from anything that is related to politics or major social issues. Now that Twitch’s new categories and labels are getting enforced, it’s still unclear as to how things will pan out regarding the reduced ad revenues.
For now, all you can do is create unbiased content without focusing on any social or sensitive issues and you should be good to go.