You probably could notice that thing appearing on top of my chat telling you that boosting my channel is in progress, I think it even was constantly there glitched out for a couple of days. That’s new Twitch’s feature finally finding some actual use for channel points that is not just to burn them (even though I like the ability to get some emotes, but for some reason it is actually barely used).
So what’s this boosting about and what do I think about it, let’s see…
First of all the concept of this feature is actually great, because it allows people to “invest” their points in channel they watch and its growth and it allows channel to get more exposure and that growth. Exposure and growth being achieved by putting boosted channels on front page in recommended section currently, providing extra visibility for your channel.
All good on paper, but let’s see what’s bad about it?
- Front page is an atavism, something that we evolved past long ago and basically not being used by majority of people. Will write a separate article later about front page, maybe not even one about different aspects of it, but currently from my experience and what I’ve heard from other streamers and viewers it is not the best page on Twitch. Boosted channels being put quite high there right under the carousel player with streams playing on front page, so looks like kinda nice placement on paper at least, but considering not a lot of people use the front page and other issues that I mention next I don’t think I’ve seen any effect from these boosts.
- Algorithm that picks those streams to show you is not tuned yet and complete pepega. During my research checking front page not too zealously, but from time to time and I had just a few english streams, everything else was in any other language, only few russian ones too, so dunno how it works, just literally any language passes even though I clearly set preferences and don’t understand so clearly not interested in clicking that even. Same goes to games – not a single stream relevant to what I watched recently even, not something any streamers I watch streamed, not something I streamed, complete random stuff, had Fortnite of course, PUBG Mobile even, World of Tanks and bunch of other games that are irrelevant for me.
- All those streams just flash there and every time you refresh pretty much you will get a new one, maybe once every couple of minutes, so coupled with it being clearly boosted stream, same position in the block of recommended streams and constantly changing irrelevant (as I mentioned above) streams, people would just get banner blindness developed like it happens with ads and all those streams will be auto-ignored by viewer brains most of the time. Then also because of current pepega version of this system I bet removing those streams will become highly anticipated feature in BTTV and FFZ which will also negatively affect the effectiveness.
So overall let’s say it’s not very effective. There should be stats for those boosts in your channel analytics, but for some reason I still didn’t get those, so I can’t see actual stats, but just by observing follower numbers, viewer numbers and other things I can compare with my averages – no difference noticed. It could be something minuscule though, that is hard to notice, but honestly even one new potential community member here and there would be great in my book. Problem is with issues that I mentioned with algorithm chances that my channel is showed to someone for whom it would be relevant are also minuscule and that’s pretty sad, because the concept of this feature is good, just execution is not great.
How can it be improved? Well obviously first of all by tuning algorithms, overall recommendation block on front page seems quite alright, mostly it just shows channels that I already watched before, some that I already follow, which is a bit of a waste, but maybe it’s just me, since some people have hundreds of channels followed and might lose some in their sidebar, so being reminded of some might be nice. Also shows channels that I watched, but didn’t follow, which is also nice, sorta retargetting in marketing terms, trying to convince me to follow something I watched, but didn’t follow. But actually new stuff that I would be interested to watch I barely seen, except one channel that was actually interesting – some outdoors wilderness “survival” IRL streams, not really into watching Twitch a lot lately, but at least one good guess of the algorithm. With tuning algorithms for boosted channels it will increase effectiveness a lot too and will provide more relevant viewers to channels also. Another improvement would be with spots where you can see those recommendations, I think they need to experiment with other placements too, not only on front page and maybe somehow randomize it a little to avoid people developing blind spot over all those boosted channels. Other thing is on channel side – I think people contributing to the boost need some extra motivation, maybe some emote unlocks or some other features, maybe making it into some sort of mini-game with investments and stuff like this, to make people interested into contributing their points for boosting your channel. Not like there is better use for the points or any value in having them, but some people treat them way too seriously, so wouldn’t hurt “gamifying” or incentivizing it more.
To summarize I’m pretty happy with the fact that Twitch is trying to increase discoverability of channels on the platform and I hope they will work in that direction more, because there are loads of streams on the platform and focusing all the audience in a pretty small number of big streams is also a bit of a risk factor. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket – basic rule that will work here too, especially considering people being upset over some Twitch decisions, platform wars etc, losing some top streamer to other platform would hurt a lot less when people have lots of others to watch. Also a lot better from perspective of smaller streamers being a lot more “loyal” to the platform, having less rebel spirit than those who already made it. But tbh all that also asks for a whole separate article, so we’ll talk about it in detail later.