Twitch 
is known for having a plethora of ways that streamers can monetize their streams with embedded features such as donations and subscribers, but there’s more that influencers can do to make a living.
There are a number of different ways that streamers can use sponsorships to further monetize their platform on Twitch including sponsored streams and long-term deals.
Many of the brands associated with sponsorships are endemic to esports. Headphone makers, peripheral manufacturers, and hardware companies are just a few of the biggest activaters in the space.
However, a few brands outside of esports are known for their willingness to use esports as a vehicle for marketing. Top energy drink brands like Monster Energy
and Red Bull are so firmly entrenched in esports and gaming marketing that they’re nearly considered to be endemic, and food delivery companies like Uber Eats and Postmates have used Tyler “Ninja” Blevins and Mike “Shroud” Grzesiek respectively to sell their services.
Additionally, developers often use sponsorships to help promote their games, especially surrounding a new title’s release date in order to build hype. These sponsorships are typically shorter than other brand deals. Often streamers are paid to play or promote a new game, such as the recently released battle royale game Apex Legends, for just a few hours, and if the game is appealing to the streamer, he or she will continue playing/promoting the game after their allotted sponsorship slot.
Credit: Hershey’s
Brand Sponsorships
Longer term sponsorships by brands on Twitch are largely similar to the types of sponsorships that happen across other industries. A brand will pay an influencer, or many influencers, to promote the products that the brand has. Frequently a brand sponsorship will include the streamer displaying a branded banner on their Twitch page and/or display numerous branded objects around the stream.
One of the biggest examples of product placement is on streams like that of Tyler “Ninja” Blevins and Tim “TimTheTatman” Betar. These streamers have sponsorship deals with Red Bull and Monster Energy, respectively, and on their webcam, viewers can always see a branded fridge in the background for their respective energy drink sponsor.
The basic product placement goes beyond fridges that decorate a room. Often times endemic brands, like peripheral company Razer, will send their streamers any new gaming equipment that they develop when it comes out. In turn, influencers will try out new keyboards, mice, headphones, etc. on stream and discuss the items to their community of followers. Because of the endemic nature of those sorts of activations, they come across as more organic to Twitch viewers who can sometimes be finicky when it comes to authenticity.
Sponsored Streams
To juxtapose the long-term brand deals by streamers that involve repeated product placement and branding, there are much shorter partnerships that exist in the form of sponsored streams. These sorts of sponsorships are typically reserved for developers and publishers looking to get their game promoted, but sometimes a streamer will advertise for an upcoming movie or event.
Stream sponsorships that are for movies are less frequent, but usually they include an influencer showing a trailer for whatever movie they’re promoting. They might also discuss the movie for a short while and bring it back up from time to time while they play the games that they usually play.
Credit: Red Bull
Game sponsorships are one of the biggest ways for developers to generate interest in a new title around the time it releases. If a publisher can manage to pin down a handful of Twitch’s most popular streamers, they can generate the kind of viewership on Twitch that will help them sell more copies.
Developers will assign a time for certain streamers to promote and play their game, and as a way to abide by the rules of the Federal Trade Commission, influencers make sure to denote that they are playing a certain game as a part of an ad. Usually a streamer will put something like “#ad” in the title to their stream to make sure they’re being forthcoming to viewers.
From the streamer’s perspective, these sorts of opportunities can provide benefits, but they also involve a degree of risk. Frequently, playing a high-profile upcoming title, sometimes before it’s even released, will help generate massive short-term viewership growth for a streamer.
However, streamers can’t simply jump at any opportunity to play a new game as a sponsored stream. Many Twitch viewers highly value authenticity in personality broadcasters, and if someone is seen as playing a game exclusively to make sponsorship revenue, it could hurt his or her reputation and following.
With ample opportunity for high-profile streamers to make money on Twitch, it’s about more than just making as much money as possible for most streamers. While they’d like to have support from brands and sponsors, they have to make sure that whatever they do is on brand for them.
