Unfortunately, this isn't how Twitch operates, either.
Twitch is primarily an ad platform. That's where they make most of their money, and why they're making changes to increase ad impressions. Subscriptions used to give you site-wide ad-free. Now it's only for that channel.
See Devin Nash streams for insight into the business of Twitch. It's not public info, so it's a lot of reading between the lines and anonymous first-hand accounts, but I imagine it's accurate.
The direct-pay model is vastly preferable because it keeps advertisers from controlling content, and Twitch certainly has shown greater success here than I've seen before. But it's not happening on Twitch. At least not like it should.
90% of the adverts I see on Twitch are for Amazon Prime which suggests that Twitch advertising isn't naturally selling out.
Twitch since acquisition has made some changes (e.g. no longer hiding ads for prime members, forcing pre-roll ads on channels) to increase the amount of adverts seen but content creators hate adverts.
Twitch is live and not episodic which means that it relies on people watching and staying to watch. Pre-roll ads cause a noticable bounce rate, where someone clicks on a channel and because an advert starts playing thinks "nevermind" and clicks a different channel. Adverts during streams are suitable for some games with natural pauses but for others just interrupt things and any time creators have a break (which they should have more often for their health), they will lose a significant part of their audience.
Most games don't have a natural cliffhanger or other hook to get people to wait for "after the break", so the audience will just think, "I wonder what x is doing" and click through to their channel instead. In fact they don't need to wonder, it's present on their sidebar as a constant reminder of what other channels are showing.
So there's this weird situation where Twitch is reliant on both content creators and want advertising revenue but adverts actively harm content creators so resent being forced to play adverts.
Twitch is primarily an ad platform. That's where they make most of their money, and why they're making changes to increase ad impressions. Subscriptions used to give you site-wide ad-free. Now it's only for that channel.
See Devin Nash streams for insight into the business of Twitch. It's not public info, so it's a lot of reading between the lines and anonymous first-hand accounts, but I imagine it's accurate.
The direct-pay model is vastly preferable because it keeps advertisers from controlling content, and Twitch certainly has shown greater success here than I've seen before. But it's not happening on Twitch. At least not like it should.