Research & Development: Twitch As A Scaling Creator Marketing Platform

In Q4 of 2022, Alie Medina Fetterman and me were tasked with a R&D project into establishing Twitch as a new source of revenue for our partners. This project addressed the problem of over-saturation of creator advertisement on YouTube by exploring the untapped potential of influencer marketing on Twitch. Our research goal was to establish Twitch as a viable solution for brand partners whose products had not found success on YouTube due to the lack of brand fit.

Here's a depiction of the planning and research involved in completing this project.

The recommended solution to use Twitch as an alternative to YouTube for creator advertisement involved in-depth research into the influencer marketing growth potential on the platform, identifying influencers with relevant audiences, developing tailored pricing strategies, and curating the talking points and guidelines necessary to contact creators and launch our first campaign.

After thoroughly researching the platform, we realized some of Twitch's unique leverageable characteristic:

• Community-like channels - Different to YouTube, Twitch creators presented a smaller but more committed community of followers due to their paid for subscription business model which presented higher selling possibilities if done correctly.

• Stream Format - Brands were able to gain a more precise understanding of the audience's interest in their product/service due to the live selling form of content.

• Engagement in pricing - Twitch presented new set of KPI's that forced us to evaluate creators differently than on YouTube. Upon further research we realized that Twitch's algorithm not only provides the total & average views, but also relevant data that speaks to the creator's audience engagement and relevancy.

• Accurate Pricing - We created a new pricing formula in order to match the CPM (cost per thousand views) to the campaign's target and expected views per stream. The formula is presented as: ((Ad Spend/30-day average views)*1000)/100) and the campaign goal was to remain in an average $1 CPM. *If the engagement indicators were positive, as per the example shown above, we remained flexible in CPM.

• Short Feedback Loop - Contrary to YouTube where ad results would take 2-4 weeks to be ripe enough to consider, Twitch ad-generated results could be considered within 1-2 days after the stream which allowed us to go through the testing cycle at a faster pace, and course-correct more efficiently.

The value of investing in the establishment of Twitch as a solution to not only our clients but also to Makrwatch as an agency, lied in being able to provide partners a cost-effective outsourcing alternative to explore Twitch's ROI potential.

The knowledge gained from understanding the influencer marketing landscape on Twitch and the efficacy of ads for direct-to-consumer reach helped us differentiate our value offering from that of our competitors and allowed us to conceive, manage and finalize two Twitch Campaigns with a total budget of 375k USD. With the completion of this project, we were able to open up new ad-revenue possibilities for brands while developing innovative practices to apply to our existing processes.