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YouTube streamer Ludwig speaking into a microphone.
Screengrab via YouTube.com/MogulMail

The good, the bad, and the ugly: Ludwig dishes on fight between YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch

You can probably guess which one was "the ugly."

Ludwig has made it a point in the past few months to continually analyze the competition between top content creation platforms. And in a Mogul Mail video posted yesterday, the YouTube star gave his takes on the past few weeks.

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With YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch all making various announcements, Ludwig shaped his narrative through the classic trope “the good, the bad, and the ugly.” In his metaphor, TikTok was “the good” after making a few changes to the way the creators can monetize on the platform.

Meanwhile, the two less appealing descriptors were reserved for YouTube, the platform that Ludwig has an exclusive contract with, and Twitch, the platform that he previously livestreamed on.

YouTube was the bearer of the “bad” after the platform announced that it is increasing the price of its Premium subscription from $17.99 per month to $22.99. The platform also tested the possibility of requiring users to have Premium to have the option of seeing videos in 4k.

While the news that’s come out about YouTube over the past two weeks is by no means hugely detrimental to the platform, Ludwig didn’t seem to be too into the idea of the platform asking more from consumers.

“Not the best announcements from YouTube,” Ludwig said. “I have to admit, some pretty bad ones. They did end up scrapping this test, but clearly they have a problem in that they are paying way too much in server costs, which is something Twitch had gone through, which is why they dropped all the creators’ pays, or at least that’s why they said they did.”

Lastly, Twitch was the “ugly” because of some of the incremental changes that the platform has made to its ad incentive programs. 

“This program is wholly a good thing, but it has also created a lot of tension,” he said.

While the ad incentive program seeks to give creators peace of mind about their monthly income, some have noted that it is steadily pushing for creators to run more and more ads each month. 

In previous months, some streamers noted that they had options of running one to three minutes of ads per hour. But lately, the requirements for the ad incentive program have increased to between five and eight minutes of ads for some creators. 

According to Ludwig, the growing sentiment among streamers is that the program has become a “trojan horse” attempting to get creators to run “way, way, way too many ads.”

“When the program started, everyone was pretty hype on it,” he said. “But now… They’re bumping the numbers, and it’s a lot harder to hit, at minimum six minutes of ads an hour.”


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Author
Image of Max Miceli
Max Miceli
Senior Staff Writer. Max graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a journalism and political science degree in 2015. He previously worked for The Esports Observer covering the streaming industry before joining Dot where he now helps with Overwatch 2 coverage.