Months after its launch, Twitch’s micro transaction feature, Cheering, is well on its way towards ending third-party donations.
We know this because we’ve had a chance to look at something buried between other stats in the TwitchCon keynote last month. During that announcement, the company announced that 166,148,917 bits were used to cheer for broadcasters in the three months between the feature’s release and TwitchCon. If you base the revenue of those bits off the cheapest price in Twitch’s tier system, it works out to be just under $2.05 million.
Twitch rolled the Cheering feature out into limited beta on June 27 with six pricing tiers, partially as a way to combat chargebacks associated with third-party donation buttons like that of PayPal, which would incur a $20 fee. Those fees could often drop a broadcaster’s PayPal accounts into the negative. With Cheering, Twitch gets a cut of each cheer for a streamer, something that it doesn’t get off PayPal and other third-party donation systems, with a percentage (equal to one cent per bit) paid to the broadcaster directly. So Cheering was something of a win-win situation for both Twitch and its streamers.
Cheering has so far only rolled out to a few thousand partnered broadcasters. The 166,148,917 bits have been used on 2,479 partnered streamers, according to Twitch CEO Emmett Shear, who announced the stat during the TwitchCon keynote on Sept. 30.
While the minimum revenue of those bits is equal to around $2.05 million, based on the 25,000 bits for $308 tier (the maximum discount at 12 percent), the actual amount is likely much higher than that, with the maximum revenue earned totaling almost $2.33 million if each bit purchased was through the 100 bits for $1.40 tier.
Twitch recently expanded the Cheering beta to include more partners. And while it has not yet announced when the system will be rolling out to all channels, its popularity so far can only mean good things for streamers?—?and hopefully the end of those pesky chargebacks.
