News On Twitch: Is the Livestreaming Platform A Viable Future Home for Journalism?

While Twitter is in the throes of chaos after being bought by Elon Musk, Facebook and Instagram struggle with controversy after controversy, and TikTok remains in legal limbo over privacy practices and its relationship to China, many people are looking for new spaces to connect across the internet.

Facebook and Twitter are particularly significant to the digital strategies of journalists and media organizations around the world. As countless online users reconsider where (and how) they communicate, though, digital-first publications are beginning to re-evaluate where they should be building audiences. Many news providers have looked beyond the traditional platforms to places like TikTok and Reddit, but one platform — or service, as they often bill themselves — has also begun to figure into the strategies of several media organizations in recent years: Twitch.

Twitch.tv (owned by Amazon since 2014) hosts live-streamed and digitally broadcast content. It has long been associated with, and still largely caters to those seeking, video game-related content — the site most notably piqued the interests of the internet in 2020, when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) garnered over 400,000 viewers playing “Among Us” in her debut Twitch stream — but a significant portion of Twitch’s content and creators are unrelated to video games.

There are a dozen major publications currently streaming on Twitch, and Digiday proclaimed that Twitch had begun “emerging as a favorite new platform for publishers” in 2019.

The Washington Post was considered the first news publication to launch an official Twitch channel when they did so in 2018. The Post initially hosted video game-related content with Post staff, but after an absence, the Post has primarily hosted the equivalent of a digital news show on the channel with a variety of dedicated hosts. The Washington Post returned to broadcasting on its Twitch channel in 2022, but its channel has mostly provided special coverage of major events, such as a six hour broadcast on the night of Election Day.

Worker-owned sports-and-more site Defector offers a varying forms of streams on the website, although it also recently moved one of their Twitch shows to Amp, another Amazon-owned social network. In April, The Recount launched a Twitch channel for its daily show, Recount Live, and in August, Vice Media joined in as well, bringing the VICE World News show to Twitch.

A leading example among publications providing news on Twitch, currently, is Rolling Stone. The magazine formed a partnership with Twitch in 2020, when the latter website approached them in search of “premium music partners,” according to Christopher Cruz, and the show Rolling Stone on Twitch — which Cruz executive produces — was born in March 2021.

“I saw that there was an opportunity to blow it out a little bit more than I think anybody had really planned to,” Cruz said after reviewing Twitch’s initial proposal. “I saw an opportunity to do something that Rolling Stone had not done before, which was create a legitimate consistent daily show, and put permanent faces on it.”

Cruz had worked for Rolling Stone for four years prior, and he felt the lack of regular faces throughout Rolling Stone content was one “missed opportunity” in the organization: “It’s something that the magazine always had in the past with Hunter S. Thompson, you know, Jann Wenner himself. Personalities were such a massive stake in the brand early on.”

Personalities are an integral part of Twitch, too. Several of the site’s top creators are celebrities and influencers. Hip-hop artist T-Pain, comedian Andy Milonakis, and more recently, actress Keke Palmer, are some of the notable household names who have turned to live-streaming, both for fun and business.

The Rolling Stone on Twitch staff — comprised of five full-time staff members, including current hosts Jon Weigell and Charlie Cooper — not only averages over 2 million views a month since launching under two years ago, but maintains a daily streaming schedule and have booked guests on the show such as Bill Nye, Taika Waititi, and Sheryl Crow. Twitch has since included the magazine’s show in their incubation program in support of music and musicians on the site.

The show, which was inspired by MTV programming in its heyday, approaches its live output on Twitch in the same way that any other news product on cable does.

“There’s an entire team of really good writers and fact checkers and researchers [at Rolling Stone] who are working their asses off to produce factual reporting every day,” Cruz told Mediaite, “and we just get to piggyback off them.”

Twitch isn’t necessarily a platform that most news providers or news seekers prioritize – a June Pew Research survey showed the service accounts for less than 1% of both journalists and consumers’ top social networks related to news – but it’s not totally a non-factor, either. 13% of Twitch users reported in a separate Pew Research survey published in October that they do get news information from the website in some form, up from 11% in 2020.

By comparison, 33% of TikTok users say they receive news information from the app in 2022, up from 22% in 2020, and 30% of YouTube users reported receiving news while using the site in 2022, down from 32% in 2020. In essence: there is a growing news audience, albeit a marginal one. But what does that look like for news consumers?

“In reality, I think there’s so many different ways that news is hitting you, like I’m gonna get a tweet notification or a Slack notification or something way before I get it on a Twitch channel,” Cruz explained. “But I would come to Twitch for dissection and conversation. To me, the value of it isn’t necessarily breaking news. It’s living in the news that we know, and digesting it, and having the discourse that Twitch affords you.”

Conde Nast’s WIRED Magazine occasionally streams video games or tech gadgets. Service Editor Alan Henry told Mediaite in an interview that he proposed regular Twitch streams before he was hired at the publication in 2020 — and he suggested the same at one of his previous employers, The New York Times.

“I proposed a regular Twitch stream where we would introduce people to our journalism, specifically our service-y tech coverage and the work my friends at Wirecutter and I were working on before I left,” Henry said. He believes that “the powers that be there never really bit at the idea,” but when he began to interview at WIRED, “everyone I spoke to there was excited about the idea, so when I started I had the full support of the newsroom, which was really refreshing.”

Henry created a Twitch show called Game Therapy on WIRED’s Twitch channel, “where we would try to play cozy, uplifting games while offering genuine help and support to my viewers (sometimes with regard to tech, sometimes not.)”

While Twitch has close to 2 million “Affiliates” — users who can monetize their channels while streaming on the site — they also have close 60,000 “Partners.” Both are eligible to receive income from subscriptions, a share of revenue from ads played on their channel, and “bits,” a financial incentive users can give to “cheering” streamers — all of which Twitch takes a share of. Partners, however, have separate deals for monetizing their presence, including a different “split rate” determining how much they take home, and a much more active relationship with Twitch.

Streamers have the opportunity to earn via Twitch or third-party opportunities, such as endorsement deals and sponsored streams, just like athletes and influencers. The market, often referred to as the “market economy,” has significantly grown in recent years, with one organization estimating its total worth as of July 2022 was $100 billion. T-Pain told gaming publication Kotaku this month that if he streamed on Twitch full-time, he would make the equivalent of $60,000 per hour.

WIRED’s channel is not a Twitch Affiliate or Partner. “We don’t see a dime from it, and honestly, I’m fine with that,” Henry told Mediaite. “I’d love to get access to some of the features that Twitch affiliates and partners do, but we’re definitely not doing it to make money, we’re doing it because part of WIRED’s mission is to be a guide to the future, and well, that means hanging out where people who care about the future hang out.”

Like much else, money plays a major factor in providing news. Media organizations’ ability to earn financially is not as clear cut as they may be elsewhere. For example, to align with the newspaper’s policy against accepting donations, the Washington Post’s channel does not allow viewers to use Twitch’s cheering function or the use of “bits.” The Recount reported to Digiday that Twitch takes 50% of all ad revenue garnered during broadcasts, which is likely aligned with other agreements the service strikes with different business partners, whether they are news organizations or media companies.

Brands and organizations, however, have a harder path to establishing themselves as streamers as opposed to individuals. Companies are discouraged from streaming themselves because the type of content that is successful on Twitch, and the difficulties that can come with growing and maintaining an audience, are generally not conducive to the financial objectives of most brands, at least according to former Twitch strategist Jack Appleby.

While they were not primarily focused on providing news, several other media ventures that tried to make viable, wide-scale networks successful via Twitch proved insufficient. G4, a Comcast-owned brand that used to be a 24-hour cable network for gaming in the 2000s and 2010s, shut down in October after less than a year of primarily broadcasting live content on Twitch. VENN, a startup digital network that sought to become the “MTV of video games,” also primarily broadcast on Twitch throughout its year-long run until it ceased most operations in chaotic fashion in August 2021.

The burden on other organizations to financially support themselves to even produce social and video content, let alone in an experimental fashion like live-streaming, may be more imperative. After the pandemic and economic obstacles in recent years, many publications have largely curbed efforts to invest in using Twitch. Channels such as Buzzfeed Multiplayer and Cheddar Esports have lied dormant in recent months while their parent organizations struggle financially. Buzzfeed, Inc.-owned Complex, which signed a deal with Twitch in October 2020, streamed multiple shows a week until October 2022, when all of them stopped streaming altogether (Complex did not respond to an email request from Mediaite.)

Twitch, like magazines and cable news, has relied heavily on the drive of personalities — not just for an audience, but for revenue.

That leaves most streams purveying news to be from individual creators, instead of established publications and media brands. Multiple individual creators provide info on or about Twitch, such as Jake Lucky and Lowco. Many other creators in the space, though, are doing so in the vein of political commentary or advocacy content, with former The Young Turks network host Hasan Piker — known on Twitch as HasanAbi — being arguably the most prominent example, boasting 2.4 million followers. According to leaked data from Twitch’s database in October 2021, Piker had received more than $2.8 million in payouts from the site since 2019, the thirteenth-highest at the time.

One Twitch channel with dedicated, news-driven content is Today On Stream, a daily news show hosted by Zach Bussey, a Toronto-residing content creator who discusses any and all Twitch-related news topics approximately five days a week while also running a weekly newsletter entitled “Today Off Stream.”

Bussey describes Today on Stream as a “kind of a mix of ‘Twitch News’ and The Daily Show.”

“I don’t consider myself a journalist,” Bussey told Mediaite. “I think of myself as a content creator whose content is news.”

Bussey first tried to stream gaming content in 2014 but stopped. He then returned to 2018 and, amidst a growing segment of “IRL” content on the site, tried streaming again. “One segment that came about was Twitch Thursdays, where I would cover some stories happening among creators,” he said, “and that became the community’s favorite stream. I was passionate about it, so I started covering it more frequently… and things just grew from there.”

Bussey has opted not to be a Twitch Partner, so he is still subject to the monetization and revenue-splitting standards of the site.

Still, Twitch faces the same headwinds as every other social media platform. Although it is owned by one of the richest corporations in the world, it has been plagued by negative publicity in recent years, resulting in several creator boycotts and viral campaigns largely criticizing their management of issues such as harassment, bigotry, and violence on the site. The struggles different organizations and creators are having establishing themselves on Twitch are understandable, considering Twitch itself is struggling to establish itself, based on the assessment of Bussey and others.

“I don’t think Twitch is set in stone in the digital landscape. Twitch is the best place to create live content online,” Bussey said. “Others are attempting to eat market share (namely Tiktok and YouTube). But where both of those sites have VOD content-based discovery to build a business around, Twitch relies on their creators to both create content AND drive discovery to the platform. That’s a precarious position overall.”

Twitch also announced their decision recently to cut the share of subscription revenue most of their affiliates and partners receive from the platform beginning in 2023, meaning that some creators will start receiving less of the share of income from their work.

Additionally, most of Twitch’s top creators are not pre-established names in news. Even Piker’s impressive 2.4 million followers, doesn’t even crack the top 100 amongst the site’s most-followed streamers. So thus far, brand and name recognition alone don’t succeed via Twitch as they may elsewhere.

All of these factors considered, is Twitch sustainable for providing news in the distant, or even near, future? Those currently doing so have varying responses.

“I feel there’s a real opportunity to make a name for oneself on Twitch as a news provider. The vast majority of ‘newsy’ content tends to find itself in the political space, but there are others,” Bussey said. “As an individual, it would require a dedication of time and effort and a particularly engaging persona.”

“One of the benefits of Twitch is that you establish an actual community around a particular topic. The direct feedback of a live chat allows you to examine a specific topic from dozens of different perspectives,” said Bussey.

He also notes the downsides of doing it live: “You might want to research a topic, get sources, verify and then share… [but] live, you’re doing everything on the spot. That makes it hard to be definitive. You may have a particular viewer who get under your skin or attempts to sabotage things. It is all also a lot of work, and it will likely take YEARS before you have any community enabling the benefits mentioned above.”

Rolling Stone‘s Cruz expressed similar sentiments. “If Twitch permeated into greater pop culture, it’s absolutely a viable platform.”

Cruz expressed hope for news providers joining Twitch in the future.  “If you’re a young person who wants to be a reporter, and you know, shit like CNN doesn’t seem like a real place where you think you could work or want to do that, you could report on Twitch, directly to the people,” he said. “You know, I think it’s a more natural place to do it than like an Instagram, where influencer culture has such a hook into what actually hits the algorithm.”

“The real beauty of Twitch is that it creates an environment where you can engage with as few or as many people on your own terms, mostly,” Henry told Mediaite. “It’s a fun and casual way to let our audience, and hopefully people who are and will become readers, sit in on a great conversation between a journalist and a subject matter expert.”

It remains to be seen whether journalism on Twitch is just a fad well past its peak or a new frontier for video content to thrive for decades to come. You’ll have to keep streaming to find out.