2024-12-13: I Dropped My Twitch Affiliate Contract

I almost feel like this needs some kind of "Platforms hate this one trick" clickbait title. But anyway, I politely requested Twitch terminate my affiliate agreement yesterday.

This decision had been a long time coming. Several months ago Peebs did the same thing and found that, possibly obviously but not something I was aware of, de-affiliated streamers have no ads on their streams. I'd been an affiliate since day one of the program and had just assumed ads ran but the streamer had no control over them. Not the case.

So I'd been thinking about this for awhile, and really there's a lot of reasons for this decision:

  1. No ads is pretty neat
  2. I disagree with a lot of what Twitch has done in the past couple years, including the addition of new features rolled out early, or even only, to affiliates
  3. I stream infrequently enough now and days that I feel bad taking subscription money
  4. I never actually made any money off of this. In fact the time sunk each year to process the 1099 form was probably more costly than the year's payouts
  5. Twitch has been pushing more aggressive "support your streamer" stuff I had no control over, that I found distasteful

The reasons were there. As for the other side of the coin, what I expected to lose:

  1. All revenue, which see point 4 above
  2. Emotes, which are a fair chunk of my stream branding and chat vibe
  3. Being down-prioritized for transcodes
  4. Being down-prioritized for discovery, which I soft consider a bonus
  5. VOD retention; dropping Affiliate may cut my VOD retention period
  6. Channel points, which I never used
  7. Slower support response, but not by much given like half of Twitch qualifies as affiliate

Nothing there was really compelling, so I pulled the trigger. Actually dropping your affiliate agreement isn't even all that hard. If you're an affiliate you have a special request category (shockingly called "Affiliates") when you go to file a basic support ticket. In there is a sub-category called "Offboarding". Then you provide a short message indicating your desire to end your affiliate agreement.

Twitch responded immediately (with what I suspect was an LLM) and asked me to confirm. I responded and said yes, and it was done. Well, not quite done: my dashboard broke in multiple ways and is still broken, but I can stream and function properly. I just have buttons that do nothing but throw errors if I click them now: ad controls and subscriber info stuff.

I also still have my follower emotes? I am unsure if I should expect to keep those or not. Twitch's docs say only an affiliate or partner can upload new emotes, but I can still see and use and assign the ones I already uploaded?

I streamed that evening and everything seemed fine. So what ended up changing?

  1. No ads, anywhere on my stream or my VODs
  2. My subscribe button is gone and recurring subs auto-canceled
  3. My subscriber emotes vanished immediately, my follower emotes did not
  4. My subscriber info page on my dashboard now loads to a blank black page
  5. My subscriber count and "ad free time" widgets vanished from my dashboard but the "run an ad" buttons did not
  6. The ad scheduler is still there and can be toggled with, but the revenue section prints a red error
  7. I can still see my past revenue info but trying to interact with anything there throws an error
  8. I still get transcode options, or at least did last night

Oh, and I got an invitation to join the affiliate program immediately after I was removed. Good going Twitch. This however goes to show that they don't anticipate people not accept the affiliate agreement or leaving the program once they qualify.

So really the only thing I lost were emotes, and maybe I didn't even lose those? I'm addressing this with a combination of FrankerFaceZ emotes and setting my emotes up in Discord. People would need Nitro to use them in Discord outside of my chat but there's not much I can do about that.

A small loss in exchange for no ads and no mental load regarding "what the hell is Twitch advertising to my viewers with my name on it". It's actually revitalized my spark for streaming, for the moment.

I'm anticipating that some point in the future Twitch will change their approach here and force ads on non-affiliates. Especially since this push for casual/non-career streamers to drop affiliate seems to be growing; I know a dozen streamers who have done it in 2024 and recommend others too. But well, I got re-invited to the program instantly when I left so if that happens I can re-affiliate; hah!

All upsides so far; I might actually stream more now. I feel so very relieved of a massive amount of guilt I felt that just by streaming, Twitch was trying to milk money from my viewers on my behalf. That's gone now.

tags: personal