TwitchThe path to partnership is not an easy one. Any streamer who wants to become an official partner of the platform must meet strict requirements: within a 30-day period, they must stream on at least 12 different days, stream more than 25 hours of content, and maintain an average of 75 viewers across their entire live time away.

This last requirement is the trickiest, since most streamers start broadcasting to a few friends at most, and since Twitch’s internal discoverability features are notoriously not particularly well-suited to helping creators grow, expanding that initial viewer pool can take a lot of time claim . Many streamers won’t find a partner in the first 30 days of trying and will have to spend several months or even years chasing that status – but it’s worth chasing because becoming a partner means getting a larger share of revenue from things like Channel subscriptions and you have more control over channel customization and ad serving.

However, thanks to a new policy change at Twitch, some streamers may find it easier to find partners.

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Accordingly Angelaa member of Twitch’s Global Partner Operations team, is Twitch Raids are now also taken into account in this average viewership. Raids are one of Twitch’s core features and allow streamers who go offline to send their viewers to another streamer’s channel en masse. It’s a way for streamers to support each other and introduce their own audience to creators they like. (Unfortunately, it has also been weaponized in the past, although Twitch says it has implemented tools to prevent hate attacks from occurring again.)

In the past, Twitch has not taken raid viewership into account in streamers’ path to partnership. Angela says the decision to count it now is because Twitch doesn’t want to “punish the idea of ​​networks and communities.”

We’re actually including raids now! We don’t want to punish the idea of ​​networking and communities ❤️

– angela (@itswoori) September 28, 2024

Twitch has recently doubled down on building a creator community and adding more features to its collaboration tool Stream togetherincluding one where streamers can ask each other to join each other’s broadcasts as co-hosts while they’re live. It also introduced merged chats for multi-creator streams, a feature streamers wanted so badly that it failed Squad streamTwitch’s first attempt at an in-house collaboration tool.

By counting the raid viewership towards the partner, established streamers are freed up to make a large, tangible contribution to the careers of young talent. A streamer with 40,000 viewers overtaking a streamer with an average of 10 could be a life-changing moment if the smaller streamer is able to retain some of those viewers.

Twitch tends to have something of a mentorship culture: streamers we spoke to often cite other creators as their reason for entering the career, with many saying they wouldn’t have pursued streaming without direct encouragement and support from established streamers . This change allows these mentors to contribute even more to the development of their mentee streamers.

However, we are aware that it could also be misused. Angela added that Twitch is “definitely looking for real engagement” in raids and is therefore keeping an eye on viewbotting. But there could also be other ways to game the system, such as having larger streamers secretly charge fees to prey on aspiring partners.

Despite this potential, this change appears to be a positive overall, one that could allow streamers to crowdsource (or rather, crowd-provide) the kind of discoverability that Twitch hasn’t yet been able to offer them in a more meaningful way.