Twitch introduced some new guidelines for branded content on its platform earlier this week.
Here’s how it summarised them in a tweet last night aimed at creators: “These guidelines are bad for you and bad for Twitch, and we are removing them immediately.”
Wait, what? Yes, this is a screeching u-turn after an outcry about the new rules from Twitch’s community.
They covered some of the ways Twitch streamers show ads for the brands who they work with directly, restricting on-stream logos to 3% of the screen size, and banning ‘burned-in’ video, display and audio ads.
Burned in means the ads are pre-recorded, then inserted into the live streams, and for its part, Twitch has noted that these were technically already prohibited on its service.
Kotaku and The Verge have good summaries of the creator complaints, including – and this is very relevant for the music industry – the fact that they were likely to be particularly bad for big events with sponsors for their Twitch livestreams.
Twitch’s mea-culpa tweets last night promised creators that “we will not prevent your ability to enter into direct relationships with sponsors – you will continue to own and control your sponsorship business”.
It has updated the offending policy, but we’ll see now whether the changes assuage the anger in its community.
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