A recent feature rolled out by Twitch, and widely criticized for its pay-to-win aspect, doesn’t really have the desired effect.
If you follow Twitch news closely, you have probably heard of Boost, this new feature announced in October by the platform to give a little boost to content creators … for a financial contribution. Concretely, this “challenge” participatory asked Internet users to pay to feature a streamer they like. The total amount of donations collected at the end of this challenge then returned to the social network, while the streamer was offered a visibility boost, for example by being displayed on the platform’s home page.
Remember the Paid Boost this Stream experiment that Twitch was running last month?
Well, I collected the data – and the results are clear (and probably obvious)…
Paid Boosts don’t appear to have ANY impact! Https: //t.co/cvNpzwWlsP
– Zach Bussey (@zachbussey) December 14, 2021
Pay-to-nothing
Since its official announcement, the Boosts were already far from being unanimous among Twitch users. First, because the exercise is a little too clearly akin to pay-to-win, this practice commonly used in video games, where financial investment is the best way to achieve victory. Then because as many streamers have pointed out during the test phases, the donations of viewers are fully donated to the platform, without the streamer in question receiving any financial support.
Finally, and arguably the most important, since its experimental launch in October, the Boosts have not provided no significant audience increase to streamers. According to independent analyst Zach Bussey, who compiled the data of 125 creators and creators of content, such as their number of subscribers, their average audience or the peaks of spectators recorded since October, the results would be quite simply… non-existent.
After analyzing the data collected, the conclusion brought by Zach Bussey would be very mixed: out of the 118 streamers who broadcast content during the Boosts test, 51 would have benefited from a slight increase in their average audience. On the contrary, 48 would have recorded a drop in viewers over this period, and 18 would have seen no change. “There is no conclusive evidence that the Boosts had any impact on their feeds”, explains the analyst finally in a video shared on YouTube. We have seen better as a pay-to-win system.
