Twitch rolls back controversial ad guidelines after outcry from creators
The Twitch creator community is in an uproar after leadership behind the Amazon-owned livestreaming platform introduced — and then retracted — new guidelines for how content creators can display ads and monetize their streams.
On Tuesday, Twitch released new branded content guidelines, as well as a tool to report branded content, that would take effect on July 1. The new guidelines would restrict creators’ ability to advertise on stream, including no longer allowing creators to insert “burned in” video ads (ads that creators directly place in a stream via a streaming and production app). The proposed guidelines also included other changes, like a size limitation for on-stream brand logos so that they couldn’t take up more than 3% of the screen size.
Hours after these new guidelines were introduced, however, Twitch appeared to backpedal, after top creators like Asmongold, who has over 3.4 million followers on Twitch, talked openly about leaving the platform and thousands more spoke out on social media to criticize the changes.
Twitch issued a statement on Twitter, calling the branded content policy “overly broad” and apologizing for any confusion. The company said it would rewrite the guidelines to be clearer.
“We do not intend to limit streamers’ ability to enter into direct relationships with sponsors, and we understand that this is an important part of how streamers earn revenue,” read one tweet in Twitch’s thread. “We wanted to clarify our existing ads policy that was intended to prohibit third party ad networks from selling burned in video and display ads on Twitch, which is consistent with other services.”
Today’s branded content policy update was overly broad. This created confusion and frustration, and we
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