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Youtube deletes channels promoting Twitch streams
Good ol’ Youtube, everyone is on it nowadays…or so it seems. According to engadget, certain Youtube personalities have gotten terminated because they were promoting their Twitch channels on their Youtube accounts. That’s right – Youtube doesn’t like when you promote their competition on their platform. Granted, what business would allow you to promote yourself on their platform, using a competing platform? It sounds absurd right?
That’s like Nike holding a convention and allowing an Adidas vendor to sell kicks…IN THEIR CONVENTION! Anyway, this all plays into the big stream wars that has been going on mainly between Youtube and Twitch. In the early days, Youtube was a platform where you can find anything and everything, and it still is. However, at the same time Twitch was mostly a gaming-based platform where content creators can live-stream themselves playing different types of games.
Youtube has become more gaming content oriented over the years and has even developed a “gaming” branch of it’s own. It has a nice layout but it’s all too familiar to Twitch in my opinion.
When making content on Youtube, creators have to be careful because certain companies will place a copyright strike/claim against you for streaming their games or publishing content with their games in them. Think of Nintendo, Capcom, and Square Enix just to name a few.
However, Twitch allows creators to live-stream games with no penalties or actions taken against them. While one may think Youtube is more popular than Twitch(it’s been around longer and everyone and their mom has the Youtube app), Twitch is actually beating out Youtube as the place to go for creators to live-stream their content. Feel free to check out the stats made by streamlabs.
While both platforms have their issues, it seems that the problems with Youtube are more apparent. There have been many cases where Youtube has played favorites for channels that have an extremely large viewership and reprimanded those that didn’t, and still don’t. This clearly plays into the saying “money talks”, and while this may be true, it leaves a bad taste in the mouths of the creators. Which is why many switch over to Twitch because there’s more freedom.
Youtube did address these issues by stating “You can absolutely create videos that promote or link to Twitch”. However, they continued to say “However, as stated in our Community Guidelines, if the main/sole purpose of the content is to drive people off YouTube and onto another site, it will likely violate our spam policies. Example could be no audio/video/other info, just a link to another site.” according to an interview with polygon.
I’ve watched some of these creators videos multiple times, and it never seemed as though promoting your own channel on Twitch was a huge problem. Even though these policies may not have been violated according to Youtube, some channels have been terminated anyway. This is like me telling you “go ahead and take a cookie from the jar” and then lopping your hand off when you actually do take it. This issue has been resolved since these channels have a huge following and decided to complain, but if it happens to smaller content creators no one knows what may happen.
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While not as strict as YouTube, you still have to be careful playing copyrighted music on a stream. Since twitch saves your videos if you have copyrighted music it may result in your video being muted.
On to the bigger issue. YouTube according to a lot of content creators has gotten really bad. The algorithms of what used to show up was really good. However, now I barely even see content from people who I am subscribed to unless I have that alert notification bell turned on. They have been known to delete channels pretty easy and I believe in their user agreement they can if they want to for the most part. You can dispute it but who knows how well that will go.
Wow I didn’t even know Twitch can hit you with the copyright claims. Initially I thought that’s why a lot of people crossed over to Twitch in the first place.
Also, to add onto the subscriber issue, sometimes they would unsub you from a channel that you’d normally be subscribed to. This has actually happened to me a few times. The only way I know of how to get around not being notified is if you hit the bell and set it to notify for all posts. Good catch Sterl!