Twitch unveils short-form video tool for cross-platform promotion

Twitch has thrown its hat into the short-form video ring with a clip-editing tool that allows streamers to share content and promote their channels on other platforms.

Starting on Thursday, streamers will be able to clip portions of their archived streams and post the short, vertical videos to other social media platforms in order to drive viewers back to their Twitch channels.

Clip Editor will sit inside the management system in Twitch’s creator dashboard. From there, streamers can convert clips to portrait mode, switch fullscreen videos to split-screen to separate face cam and gameplay footage and overlay their Twitch handle. Streamers can export the videos directly to YouTube Shorts and download clips to manually upload to other social media platforms.

Twitch is working on bringing direct export options to other platforms, according to a company spokesperson. It declined to comment on why the tool only allows for direct exporting to YouTube at launch.

While streamers and viewers have already been cutting short clips out of lengthy streams, Clip Editor is Twitch’s first dedicated tool designed to simplify and speed up the process.

To optimize cross-platform promotion further, streamers can access analytics to see which clips of their stream viewers interacted with the most.

Clip Editor is currently only available on desktop, but Twitch is working on bringing the tool to its mobile app.

Speaking on why the live streaming platform, best known as a congregating spot for gamers, is focusing on short-form video and leaning on other platforms to drive traffic back to itself, Twitch said that streamers have already been using other platforms to promote their channels for years and that Clip Editor is its way of supporting that practice.

The tool could make it easier for streamers to foster brand deals that include multi-platform promotion. Twitch allows streamers to pursue their own brand deals and sponsorships, and in such cases, streamers can use Clip Editor to put sponsored stream segments on other platforms.

Twitch itself profits off of streamers amassing larger audiences. In September, it announced changes to its subscription revenue share that will cause more popular streamers to forfeit a larger percentage of money to the platform. 

While most partnered streamers already received a 50/50 revenue split with the platform, some have negotiated a 70/30 split, with the larger share going in their favor. Starting June 1, once a streamer’s contract is up for renewal, that 70/30 split will only stay in effect for the first $100,000 of subscription revenue earned over a year-long period before dropping down to 50/50 for the rest of the year. 

In a blog post, then-president and current CEO Dan Clancy stated that the change was a response to high operating costs and inconsistencies in how Twitch selected which streamers got a 70/30 split. 

Creators pushed for an even wider 70/30 split and took umbrage with how Clancy calculated Twitch’s operating costs, as he suggested that the Amazon-owned platform paid its parent company just as much as other businesses do to use Amazon’s hosting services. 

Mike Minton, chief monetization officer, responded to these concerns by stating that Amazon expects Twitch to be financially successful on its own and that a 70/30 split isn’t viable for the company.

In June 2022, Twitch upped its ad revenue split to give streamers 55% of payouts. Clancy stated that the ad revenue boost should make up for lost subscription revenue in a blog post.

Streamers largely criticized the subscription revenue change as being anti-creator.

In Q3 of last year, Twitch viewers watched just over 5.7 billion hours of live streams compared to YouTube Gaming viewers at just over 1 billion and Facebook Gaming at 382 million hours, according to data from Streamlabs.