Bloomberg Businessweek

PHOTOGRAPH BY JESSICA CHOU FOR BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK; DATA: COMSCORE

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and cooking ive days a week for a show called

CookingForNoobs. Her rules: Be positive, avoid

cursing, and don’t feed the trolls.

“Few brands are excited about reaching an audi-

ence of hardcore gamers,” says Justin Warden, CEO

of Ader Inc., a marketing agency that specializes in

e-sports. “More brands are excited about working

with an inluencer or personality.” Ader helped Walt

Disney Co. market the DVD release of Black Panther

on Twitch and is signing clients who specialize in

anime and card playing, plus gamers as adept at

humor as a joystick.

Two of the fastest-growing genres on Twitch are

livestreams of TV shows and “IRL,” or in real life,

videos—where posters welcome fans into their world

for a few hours at a time. IRL videos are an unedited

version of the video blog, or vlog, one of the domi-

nant genres on YouTube.

Few people can marshal their fans to buy books,

tickets, or makeup like online inluencers, the youth-

ful vloggers and comedians who rule YouTube. So

Amazon has an added incentive for wooing them to

Twitch. Still, rivals have attempted to compete with

YouTube for years, with little to show for it. Verizon

Communications Inc. struggled to attract users to its

video app Go90 before folding it this year. Facebook

has pursued online creators for its Watch video sec-

tion, but it isn’t yet a major source of revenue for

most online talent.

Yet YouTube’s grip on the creators has never

been more tenuous. Its investments in new areas

such as TV and music have left some creators

feeling unloved. And its crackdown on which

videos are eligible for ads has reduced revenue

for some of its top stars. “YouTube has been

confusing the creator community,” says David

Tochterman, who represents creators who work

with both YouTube and Twitch. YouTube’s con-

stant tweaks to the algorithms that power its site

have a big efect on views for YouTubers, who can

no longer rely on the site to be their sole source of

revenue, he says.

Nichole Boyd started posting YouTube videos

in 2010 and has about 500,000 subscribers to her

channel, which features home cleaning and orga-

nization tips. YouTube advertising remains her

largest revenue source, but like many inluenc-

ers, she wants to cultivate other platforms so sud-

den changes to algorithms or rules don’t kill her

business. People directed to Amazon from her

YouTube posts spend as much as $60,000 a month

at the online retailer, and she gets a commission

on everything they buy within 24 hours of visit-

ing Amazon through a link from her channel. “I

do pretty good there because a lot of the products

I have in my videos and use in my home are sold

on Amazon,” she says.

Amazon reached out to her earlier this year

about creating two videos a week for a kind of

home shopping network-style program with sev-

eral other online inluencers, Boyd says. She’s

interested in the idea—and likely so are YouTube

executives.—Lucas Shaw, with Spencer Soper

THE BOTTOM LINE Amazon’s Twitch live-video service attracts

15 million daily visitors, mostly to watch gamers. Amazon is trying to

woo YouTubers—and the ad money they draw—to the site.

 CookingForNoobs

host Christine invites

Twitch viewers into

her sometimes unruly

kitchen in real time

○ Twitch unique video

viewers on desktops

○ Unique video viewers

on desktops in June

6/2017 6/

10m

5

0

YouTube

139m

Twitch

11m

Facebook

62m