Twitch's Front Page (Update 1)

After about 24 hours, Partner support, referred me to legal. So I emailed legal the same thing I emailed to partner support.

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I have forwarded that email to them again stating that if I don’t hear from them by close of business PST on Monday, December 23, 2019, I will be filing a formal complaint for violating the Virginia Consumer Protection Act.

Let me go into more detail about why this “sweepstakes” is a problem.

This could have been completely avoided if they sent out an email saying since we are launching channel points, we will be selecting random partners and affiliates during the celebration launch time period to those that have fully set up channel points for their channel. Not even making it a sweepstakes, but just Twitch choosing people as they see fit to be on their front page. They are wholly within their right to do that. Just like their “partner spotlight” portion of the carousel they could have made a “channel points celebration” part of the carousel and thrown a random creator fitting the criteria on it once a week, just like the partner spotlight.

The entirety of this issue is the “sweepstakes” framework. I’m sure they threw together these rules to try to negate liability and look legit, but really they made a mess. The hour of carousel time is offered as a PRIZE. All prizes must have their suggested MSRP disclosed to properly comply with most states’ consumer protection laws. There is a suggested MSRP available for this “prize”, because this is something that is available for sale by Twitch.

Why wouldn’t Twitch want you to know how much an hour of front page time could be worth? (I put could, because varying time of day and day of week could be more or less valuable based on the estimated traffic on the site that day.) There are five reasons I can think of for why they did not disclose an amount.

One, they don’t what brands to know the average price for that ad space, because setting a rate can leave money on the table, and also make Twitch advertising seem unattainable to smaller brands , when it in fact could be negotiable (again referencing back the time slot and day of the week).

Two, they don’t want their content creators to know how valuable Front Page time is on the platform. They know if they set a rate of an hour on the FP is worth $5000 (I don’t know the amount this is me just throwing a hypothetical number out there), then they know it will start drama. (I’m sure that drama would be on the same level in the gaming community as when Marlena Stell disclosed the $60,000 for a branded video number, in her Dear Influencers video, in the Beauty Community on YouTube.) Mostly, because the same partners seems to always be in the carousel with only a token change every now and again.

Three, they were trying to keep the prize value law enough they didn’t have to register in the sweepstakes in certain states. Some states require sweepstakes that have prizes over a certain dollar amount to be registered which has fees and lot of lovely paperwork involved.

Four, they were hoping that by including the dollar value of the booby prizes would be enough to make it look legit that no one would notice not putting in the value of the front page time, despite it being a product for sale.

Five, most of their content creators violate giveaway and sweepstakes laws everyday on their platform, because they don’t know what the laws are in their country or state, that no one would know they were violating the law by not having that in there.

Why is this a problem? Why am I the only one that seems to care?

As a partner, I want to know just how valuable the front page time is. Twitch is owned by Amazon, they shouldn’t be making stupid horrible legal mistakes like this. If someone wins this prize, and they can’t claim it on their taxes, because Twitch doesn’t give them a value and they get audited, a clever auditor will make their life hell.

I say this is likely, because whenever I do panels on content creation, one of the biggest questions I get asked is about how to do taxes as a “small business owner”. Surprise, if you stream and make money, you’re a small business owner. You have to pay taxes on that income. If you don’t work another job, and you make above the poverty level, and are not a dependent on someone else’s taxes, you’re going to owe money come tax time. If my hypothetical $5k is close, not claiming an award of $5k is going to be really bad for you in an audit.

Framing it as a sweepstakes is a terrible liability for Twitch and they are also setting up the “winners” for a terrible liability later on, unless you know Timthetatman or DrLupo “win” since I’m sure FP time was included in their deals with Twitch to stay on the platform (and by sure I mean taking an educated guess).

This is mean holding Twitch accountable, which you know, they said we’re supposed to do. I’m just doing what they asked.