Transcript — Twitch Town Hall — Dec 16, 2020
By: Aditya Singh
Tags: Transcript, Online Harassment, Twitch, Updates, Dmca

Announcement

Speakers:

Erin Wayne (Aureylian) — Community and Creator Marketing — Twitch | Twitter

Emmett Shear — CEO & Founder, Twitch — Twitter

Jeremy Forrester — Head of Creator Products — Twitch | Twitter

Sara Clemens — COO, Twitch — Twitter

Mike Minton — Head of Monetization — Twitter

Link to the full video: Twitch Town Hall Dec 16, 2020

Erin: Hello and welcome to Twitch Town Hall. I am thrilled to take a deep dive into three big issues at the top of mind for many of you. DMCA, trust and safety and ads. Joining me today are three of the leaders of Twitch. I know that when you choose to build your community here it’s because you want to grow that community by sharing things that you love. You expect our help with managing your channel, with building new and better features to improve the experience for you and your viewers and by understanding how to grow and monetize your viewership. This year has been challenging for everyone but the last few months have been especially hard for streamers. You are counting on Twitch and in some instances, we have let you down. One of the reasons I started and still work here is because I like my coworkers’ belief in the community first company value. All of us here know that we can do better. We are dedicated to doing better and we want you to know that we definitely have your back. And I hope personally, coming out of this town hall that that’s clear. As we navigate a global pandemic and its implications for how we come together as a global community moment like this Town Hall are more important than ever. To ensure that we are moving forward with your needs and feedback in mind, we have to be able to get together. We have to listen to your feedback and we definitely need to have an open conversation about how we are working here at Twitch to make it better. And with that, I want to introduce our CEO Emmett Shear to share a little bit more about why we are here.

Emmet: I really appreciate the community that shows up for us, to talk to us and give us feedback.

Erin: We’ve hosted town halls as far as I can remember definitely for as long as I have been at Twitch and they changed over the years. We started at Packs and then we started doing Twitch tours and then we eventually had TwitchCon and now in this age of COVID we are moving these town halls virtually. So, it’s nice for us to be able to have some ways to share with the community what we have going on. It’s been a really tough year for us at Twitch, quite frankly, in terms of our communication, especially around heavy topics like DMCA and ads that we are going to be talking about today.

Emmet: I think in the early days of Twitch, we could handle a lot of our issues very much one off. We could make a customized decision for each case and I really loved that. It was one of the best things about Twitch that we tried to judge every case on their merits. And while it’s been incredibly exciting to see how big the Twitch community has gotten. As we’ve gotten bigger, we can’t always do that kind of direct, individualized response that we would like to, as fast as we would like to for everyone. When we started, we were outnumbered but these days there are a hundred thousand viewers for every one of us. And I really don’t think that abandoning the approach of making sure we respond appropriately and contextually, and do the right thing in each case is right. That’s a high bar but it’s a bar that I want Twitch to be held to and at the same time we are going to miss it. It’s hard and I know we have to work to make things automate, to make things more scalable but at the same time I don’t want to lose that individualized contextual decision-making.

Erin: Yeah, you mentioned that hundred thousand to one ratio and that really hits home to us. You and I have done interviews where we talk to people pretty regularly about what makes Twitch special and I think to your point, we definitely have to scale to maintain what keeps us special and I think for us that’s our human component. Because in a spot where other companies are services led and would already have automated things like customer support or trust and safety. We have really tried to be mindful of that when we scale. We do it in a way that still allows us to have that human connection. So, when a creator submits a partner application, a real human reads it. When they file a moderation report, a real person reviews it. And when videos on social media go up highlighting the really cool things that the community is doing, a team of people work together to make sure that those streamers are recognized for the things that they are doing. And part of that is we care a whole lot. We come from the community, we care about the community and we want to make sure that they feel heard in all of those instances by a real person. But the other side of that is that we are real people and sometimes we mess things up. And we get them wrong. And we have done that a few times this year.

Emmet: Yeah, I think that being a company that tries to bring the human connection and the human touch is a huge strength for Twitch. I think it’s one of our biggest strengths and I get that sometimes it can also be a weakness. It’s common for companies and people that your biggest strengths are sometimes both your strength and your weakness. And of course, there are so many times I wish that we did a better job. Sometimes, we just made a mistake, an error of judgement, or we just didn’t know. We made an honest error. But sometimes I think we did something really good and something really cool and then we screwed some small part of it up or we dropped the ball communicating about it and people walked away feeling that we didn’t care. I feel like that’s the part that hurts the most for me because people were thinking that we were not there to make things better for them. And I want them to know that we are. And I think that the more we can have that connection and faith, the better off we are. And it means that we get the feedback too. One thing that I have always been proud of in our community is how much everybody complains. I know that might be a strange thing to say but I appreciate everyone’s critical feedback as well as their positive feedback. Because those complaints are how we know how to keep making Twitch better. Because we know it’s not done, we are not near done. It’s very much still the early days for Twitch. And I just know whenever I walk around Twitch and I talk to all the other employees, they are, like everyone at Twitch including myself, we are here for the streamers, for the viewers. We are here because we want to make it awesome and we are also running a business. But we are streamers, viewers, we are people who want Twitch to be great and it’s not always easy to make it right but that’s what is in the top of mind and it’s brought up in every meeting, in every Slack discussion or email thread. That’s what we are using and there might be two thousand of us now. There is customer support, partnership people, sales, marketing, legal people, there is a huge team that makes Twitch work. But at the same time, there are millions and millions of people to support and given the scope of what we are trying to tackle, it doesn’t even feel like we have any people sometimes. Today we are going to be hearing from Jeremy, Sarah and Mike, three people who are in that group who care about streamers and viewers. They work specifically on the topic we are discussing but behind them are hundreds of other people making it happen. With that number of people, it can be frustrating how slow things can go, it’s frustrating for us how slow things can go but we are working on making it better.

Erin: Yeah, you mentioned that we are going to be talking with Mike today. He is one of the heads of monetization. So, he is going to be talking about ads and specifically one of the big things we are talking about today is the current set of ads, the future of ads, and that’s something we have experimented with since day one. We have always thought about how ads could look like on Twitch and this year obviously we heard lots of feedback that a few things that we tried didn’t land, we didn’t get them right. But I always find it really interesting that we aren’t more vocal about one of the ways we operate which is our experiment to decide mindset. So, if you have never heard that term at all and you are wondering what that means is that experiment to decide our mentality around running public experiments and regularly putting out products that aren’t finished and we do that on purpose. We do it so that when we go into the final phases of production for those products and when we move forward with how we are going to pivot or update those products, it’s based on feedback that we have collected from streamers and viewers and moderators and developers during those experimental phases so that the final version is exactly what you wanted it to be, what you need and what we know will help you succeed. So, sometimes those experiments aren’t great, sometimes they are wonderful, creative and built out of feedback, things that we head the community needed — chat was redesigned after a million people almost broke it after playing Twitch Plays Pokemon. So, as our CEO and as somebody who works on overseeing a lot of experiments on Twitch can you talk about what really that mindset means to you and how that impacts what happens when we release these products that don’t give us the best feedback.

Emmet: Ultimately, the only judge of products whether it’s good or whether it works or not for streamers and viewers on Twitch. And we can guess, talk to people, we can get input but it’s really hard to tell what’s going to work. In fact, I think anyone who has worked on an internet product or any kind of product will tell you that it’s impossible. No one knows what’s going to work and so you have to try things, you have to experiment and some of the things you try aren’t going to work. But that’s the only iterative way to move forward and to build things out. And sometimes, in retrospect we might think that it was so obvious, how could we possibly have missed that but I don’t know anyone at any company that manages to produce products without making mistakes or building things that where V1 sucked. And I don’t see necessarily launching and selling V1 that isn’t great yet as a problem. Of course, we want it to be great when we launch it but sometimes you miss the mark and that’s just part of life. I think the thing has changed for Twitch. The most important thing right now on which we need to change our approach is that it used to be when we launched something and it used to work great for 99% of our community that meant 10 people got a bad experience. Now, if we launch something and it is awesome for 99% of you, 1–2% of Twitch is now tens of thousands of streamers. And those tens of thousands of streamers have a bad experience on something that we know is super important for their lives. And having tens of thousands of people have a bad experience when we got something 99% right means that we have to be a lot more careful when we experiment. When we are rolling something out it’s important that we need to bear in mind the damage it can do when we do something that’s mostly a good idea but not quite there. And it’s obviously even worse that we do that isn’t 99% right. We are going to keep experimenting in public, we are going to keep trying stuff out, we are going to continue to appreciate your feedback. Please keep sending us your feedback whether it be email or user voice or customer support or partner manager. I will also say that we read social media but we read a lot of other feedback as well and we are also going to be moving our approach to try and think about it more in terms of opt-in betas and more in terms of transparency as we do these kinds of experiments when we can. So that when we get to that 99% right, we are protecting the 1% people that it didn’t work for. And everyone is having a good experience on Twitch. So, as much as I regret experiments that didn’t work out, I don’t regret that we tried it. I still think that experimenting is the right approach but as the blast radius for mistakes gets bigger and bigger for Twitch, we are going to be updating our approach and try to do it in a thoughtful way where we are still running experiments where people don’t have the negative experience from them.

Erin: I really like the way we do that, especially thinking about how we build them and not really thinking about what we come out with as a good idea but really taking that feedback. And I hope that we always continue to make products and improvements with the community’s involvement. You touched a little bit there on how our teams rely on feedback and that can be things like reports generated from feedback from creators, submitted to their account managers, user voice, all of that are turned into regular reports that are sent out. I know that I personally take time out to sit and read every single week to read all of those reports so that I understand what’s happening in the community. But I think it will be really valuable for people to know your personal experience has been staying connected to what the community is doing and how you get that feedback and what happens when you get it.

Emmet: I get a lot of people reaching out. I get people reaching out via email, I read people’s post whether they are on Twitter, Reddit, or they are blogging about it or they are doing a Twitch stream about Twitch, I go and listen to that feedback and sometimes I think that they have hit the mark exactly sometimes I have a lot of questions. I wish that I could go through every single person’s feedback and give it the time it deserves which is a full back and forth learning about what was going on and give the full context to understand but I can’t always do that obviously because there are so many feedbacks to respond to. But everyone at Twitch has at some point got an Emmett email forwarded that’s like “Hey what is that we are doing out there? Is this a real issue? How can we approach this?” and I know that I am not the only person who does that. I know that people across Twitch are reading, learning, thinking about what is the input people are giving and we find all kinds of things that we would have never known. Opportunities to do great new stuff and mistakes we have made that we never could have found if you weren’t telling us about it so thank you. I really appreciate the input and that’s how we make Twitch better.

Erin: The feedback is what I missed the most while being in quarantine and working from home. Because typically, we have E3 and Twitch tours and Twitch Cons, and other conventions and events where we can host feedback sessions or roundtables or panels or bring creators into the office and have them participate in a number of sessions or talk about what we might be building or want to and we have not been able to do that. So, I am really glad that we are doing this Twitch town hall. I am glad that people are utilizing the user voice much more frequently now because we want that feedback. It’s not something like “Give us your feedback!”. We really want it and need it because especially when we are at home, we need to rely on that to ensure that we are going through everything the way we should. So, please everyone continue doing that. We will hope that we continue doing these virtually or in-person in the future for sure.

Emmet: I really miss Twitch con and other events because I get to meet a bunch of viewers, streamers, moderators in person and it’s just a different level of learning and connection you can get from someone and in depth you can get to a person, I think. But it’s been really positive to get some of that replaced online and it’s why we are doing this here today with all of you.

Erin: Today, I know we are primarily focused around DMCA, ads and trust and safety but we got a lot of feedback on user voice, social media, specifically about discovery on Twitch, including identity tags. I know this is a topic that’s incredibly meaningful to you. You and I have talked about it in the past and I was hoping that we could spend some time quickly chatting about that before we get into the main segment of the Town hall.

Emmet: For those of you who aren’t aware of the issue, there is a large number of people who would like there to be a tag for trans people on Twitch so that they can share their identity. It’s also equally important that other people looking for transgender can discover them and form a community. Tags were developed for exactly this purpose to figure out what’s going on in stream, ways to group people, find people, and when we launched tags, it replaced a product called communities and communities had these sort of community identities that people had formed. That means we had a bunch of other issues like the fact that it wasn’t really used unlike tags but when we did that, we launched an LGBTQ+ tag as an experiment to see how does it work to have an identity tag and we had the intention to learn from that and quickly iterate into a better solution for identity tags. Obviously, it has taken longer than we would have liked. Obviously, we still believe in that direction, we believe in that goal. Because we think that people being able to express their identity on Twitch is a great thing. And people being able to find other people who can share identity with them is a great thing. As we were looking to launch new identity tags like the trans tag, specifically we ran into two problems. First problem we found is that the usage of the tag can often lead to increased harassment for streamers especially in identity groups and we wanted to make sure that we tried to solve that so that people aren’t accidentally opting into that harassment. And that equally importantly, on top of that we didn’t want to be the arbiters of identity. I don’t think that anyone at Twitch should get to tell you which identities are valid, which identities deserve a tag and which don’t. That decision has to be up to each individual as a person — how do you identify, what tags you want to use. So, we are out there picking which tags deserve to have a tag, so there will always be someone who feels left out by that. And so, I challenged it with an equal product for tags that would let people identify themselves on Twitch however they wanted to, protect themselves while they are doing that and allow viewers to find streamers who had those identities. And that’s a harder challenge that you might think. There are a lot of nuances and difficulty building a tag system that drives discovery effectively. And that also allows for self-identity and that can be moderated effectively. I am proud of the plan they put together, they really rose to the challenge, and we were hoping to release this feature this year in 2020 but we have been working with creators before we launch it and also with the community. But we realized that some of the assumptions that we were working with weren’t good enough. And so, we went back to the drawing board and we are redesigning it and I think we made a lot of progress. I think the new plan is great and we are going to share more details with you early next year and I think that’s going to be a huge step forward. Of course, we like to have done this faster. But as we were saying that this experiment side of things, getting things wrong has a high blast radius now. And I am just imagining launching something and then someone who has an identity being like where is my representation here. Or someone opting into using it and getting harassed, I don’t want that either. I am glad we took the time in getting it right. I wish we could have prioritized and got it done faster but I am excited to see what the team builds.

Erin: Yeah, and in full transparency, I am actually glad that we are covering this today because I know there have been work behind the scenes and the community has given us feedback that they don’t feel listened to or that they don’t understand what’s happening or what’s taking so long and so it was really important to know that you and I talk about this and for the community to hear what our thoughts are, what are we actually planning, what’s taking so long. So that they can realize that it is important to us. And we do care very deeply about having an experience in a product that is good for everybody when they use it and it doesn’t lead to any negative experience. So, to add to that insight as well, we are going to be showing more about the new product once it’s available and in the new year we are going to be hosting creator camp sessions specifically on discovery, including insights from product experts and a little bit more about identity tags. So, with that thank you Emmett so much for joining us. We just covered a whole lot and we haven’t even gone into the main part of the town hall yet so, I think it’s probably a good time for us to do that.

Emmet: We know you have a choice in streaming solutions and I am really happy that people choose Twitch. We are really grateful for the patronage of our service, I am really excited to get to do this with you and I think sometimes people make fun of us saying hold us to a high bar and saying that we don’t hit that bar. Hold us to a high bar isn’t about us being perfect. We are going to miss sometimes. It’s about having that expectation. I am proud to be working with a community that has really high expectations for us. I have very high expectations for us. And I am really excited to get to share all of this with you. So, thank you again.

Slide 1: Agenda for the Town Hall

Erin: Before you move into the main portion of town hall I wanted to talk about what you can expect from us to cover today. So, first we are going to dive into DMCA with Jeremy Forrester who is our head of Creator Products and he is going to go through where we are currently at with DMCA, talk about some new products that are releasing soon and cover what we have planned going into 2021. Then we will be joined by Sara Clemens, our COO to recap plans from our moderation, talk about our recent updates to our hateful conduct and harassment policy and cover what to expect in terms of future enforcements when it comes to trust and safety. Finally, Mike Minton who we mentioned earlier who oversees monetization products will take us through the future of ads on twitch and announce some really exciting updates that are in the works. We are going to feature questions from the community sporadically during the town hall as they come up through each section but we are also again dedicating an entire section at the end solely for Q&A. Often we get questions around can you build blank, have you thought about building blank, would you love to build blink and although we would love to talk about all of your ideas if you specifically want to chat about an idea or something that you want us to work on, I would also ask you to head over to twitch.uservoice.com, log your idea and we will be sure that that information and feedback get to the right teams.

Slide 2: Navigating Copyrights on your Channel

So, we are going to jump into DMCA and we are going to spend the next 30 minutes discussing new info about DMCA with the community which means that we are not going to be providing an overview of copyright law or a refresher on Twitch’s DMCA guidelines. With that said, it is still super important that you understand both and how those may affect your channel on Twitch and anywhere else that you publish your content. If you have questions about copyright law or DMCA please check out all of the recent materials we have published. There is a blog, blog.twitch.tv, we have creator camp sessions at twitch.tv/creatorcamp, and info available on help.twitch.tv. I also wanted to take a quick second to reiterate that you should not play recorded music on your stream unless you own all of the rights in the music or you have permission from the necessary rights holder. We have with us Jeremy Forrester, Head of Creator Products who is here to talk about the tools that his team is building to provide additional insurances to help you avoid copyright infringement claims on the content that you stream and you share on Twitch. Jeremy let’s start with admitting that as a streamer understanding your channel’s current risk and understanding DMCA guidelines is at best incredibly complicated and the tools that Twitch has to help creators in these areas are not good enough, specifically I personally understand why an absence of other solutions but it was still really hard to watch Twitch tell creators that their primary defense against DMCA was to delete all of their VoDs and clips. When we watched them delete their content it was literally years of hard work and then all of the memories that they have built with their communities just gone. And it felt really awful. It didn’t feel good.

Slide 3: How we’re improving the DMCA Experience

Jeremy: Yeah, you are right. I am a part of a number of communities on Twitch and I saw firsthand just how devastating it was to lose all of that content. It wasn’t a recommendation that we would have made if there was an option that made more sense in those circumstances. What I can say is that we have doubled down on our efforts to help you better navigate copyrights and content on your channel.

Our roadmap prioritizes features that improve the creator experience in the following areas. 1) music on your channel and streaming with music, 2) managing content on your channel and 3) how you track copyright claims on the platform. I also wanted to mention that although as a strategy, as a multi-pronged approach, each update on its own will make the experience a little bit better for creators. We won’t wait till all the updates complete before shipping them to you. As soon as an update is ready, we will make it available to the community.

Erin: Yeah, I think it’s really important and I am glad to know, and I am sure that the community is glad to know that this is a big priority for your team not just now but also carrying throughout the years as we implement new and future products. So, I think everyone is eager to learn, “What does that mean?”. So, let’s start at the top with music and work our way through that list. So, starting with music, earlier this year, Twitch released “Soundtrack”, a tool that gives creators access to music that’s already licensed to stream on Twitch so that as a streamer you can play music during your live broadcast without it violating copyright. We also published educational materials for creators on creator camp and on “Help Center” as we mentioned before. But is there anything else that helps creators stream with confidence knowing that the content that they stream isn’t violating a copyright or at the risk of a DMCA takedown notification.

Slide 4: Streaming with Music — Today

Jeremy: As you mentioned, a great component of the soundtrack is the multi-track audio technology that we built.

Slide 5: Streaming with Music — In Development

The music from the soundtrack doesn’t transfer over to the clips and VoDs, so you can share the music feedback version of your content wherever you want. We have this technology as useful for streamers who independently license music on their livestream and not their recorded content. We have been integrating the technology into other streaming applications so it can be accessible to more creators. Just this past Monday, it was included in OBS 26.1 which was released in Q2 and integrated in Twitch studio and we are looking forward to more of these integrations.

Erin: And to be clear, that is not to help streamers circumvent securing rates for copyrighted materials. So, those are there to help you and you should still only use content that you have rights to stream. They are just there to help you as added insurances to ensure that if anything accidentally slips through that you are covered. So, that reminds me of that case. We are talking about Twitch tools, we do have an upcoming creator camp session that’s live on twitch.tv/creatorcamp on December 22, the title of that stream is Copyrights and Managing Your Content which includes more information about the tools specifically Twitch offers for use to help you manage your content. We have 1 question — Can Twitch pay for sitewide licensing like other sites?

Jeremy: Yeah, we do pay organizations around the world like ASCAP and BMI in the US and JASRAC in Japan and SACEM in France for public performance licenses. These licenses allow creators to perform music live to their communities. This is similar to a live performance that you would see. But most of what happens at Twitch is ephemeral and our services were built to enable connections through live sharing experiences and this differentiates us from other video online sites who focus on video on demand. These services have an agreement that reflects that primarily on-demand nature. On-demand videos are more likely to be considered substitute for listening to music on a streaming service like Spotify and it comes with commensurate costs. Twitch, by contrast, offers a predominantly live interactive and unpredictable experience which is fundamentally distinct from on-demand and implicates different rights. So, while we are open about partnering with labels our agreements have to reflect the different usage and the underlying rights and landscapes to each affair for both Twitch and creators. That said, we are actively speaking to major record labels for potential additional agreements that would be appropriate for the Twitch service. We are approaching these conversations thoughtfully and in consideration of our creator community. Because we know that the current constructs for label agreement and services often use revenue earned by the creators to pay the record labels. The thing is the vast majority of our creators aren’t adding recorded music to their streams and if a creator does have the music in their stream is it okay for the label to get all of the revenue earned during an air on stream when it only included thirty seconds of music. These are the types of questions we are thinking about because they can have a substantial impact on what it means to stream on Twitch. So, we hear you and we are open minded to new structures that could work for Twitch’s unique services but we also want to show that we are not compromising your long-term economics as a result. These agreements may take some time to materialize and may never happen if we can’t reach an agreement that works for everyone. It’s not a one size fits all solution and it will come with possible trade-offs.

Erin: Yeah, it’s definitely an incredibly complicated and nuanced thing to work through. So, I am really glad to hear that we are working on it and we are having those conversations. There’s another question that we got on Twitter. This one is also about licensing but specifically as it relates to soundtrack and they asked if music and soundtrack is licensed for streaming on Twitch, why is my VoD muted?

Jeremy: Yeah, this is a common question. So, if some of your VoD is muted, then it is likely that you don’t have “Soundtrack” configured correctly. Soundtrack was built to derive music for your livestream only and not for VoDs and clips. And to do this, soundtrack streaming software captures the output sound from your application from separate tracks and removes the music from the soundtrack and then sends the remaining audio to your VoDs and clips. So, if it isn’t coming from your VoDs and clips, it is probably misconfigured. If “Soundtrack” is configured correctly, music may be included in those VoDs and clips. Those sections can be muted or deleted by audible magic which is the system that we use to detect music in your content. Streamers have unique set ups. So, it’s difficult for me to give you specific configurations or instructions right now but we do have a help article that provides guidance on how you should set up “Soundtrack” and we recommend you checking that out.

Erin: We do get a lot of generic questions like can I do blank or what is blank. And it’s difficult when those questions are asked and so heads up in Q&A if someone asks it. Sometimes, it’s like what else there is to know. Everyone’s situation is so different and unique. But probably because you have it misconfigured and so, definitely check out the link Jeremy mentioned. We have one more question from the community that relates to music. That question is — can I just get permission to stream music from the artist directly? Actually, I think I can answer that. One of the beautiful things about social media is that you can connect sometimes directly with your favorite artists and musicians. However, it’s totally possible for an artist to say that they are giving you a license or that they are okay with you streaming their music but they actually don’t have the authority to make that decision. And it’s likely because another party like the record label or a music publisher actually controls the rights to that content. So, rather than taking social medias or DMs or emails directly at face value, I would highly encourage and it is up to you as a content creator and streamer is that you make sure that you do your homework and ensure that you have the permission from the actual license holder when you are putting that content on your channel.

Slide 6: Content Management — Today

Let’s move on to the next topic of managing content on your channel. We all know that the tools available manage VoDs and clips could definitely use some work. They are not fully sufficient. And I am really excited for you to talk about the tools that you guys are building in this area.

Jeremy: I did want to let you know about a product update just before we literally started the town hall. So, now that they are assigned the role of editor on your channel can access the clips library so that they can help you review and delete clips as needed. But that’s not enough. The current options of reviewing and deleting clips are fairly extreme and you can even review each clip and delete individually or delete all the clips at once but both options are not ideal particularly if you have hundreds or thousands of clips to review. To fix this, we are going to build functionality that lets you sort and delete clips by dates, game or view count. We expect to roll this out by the second half of this year. I know that sounds like a long time and we wish we could get this to you sooner but in order to build this we need to make some significant updates to our clips infrastructure which will take some time to complete. I can assure you that we are working urgently on this and we have added more resources against it. But even with that it will take time.

Erin: Just to clarify, editors can already manage clips. It’s already out.

Jeremy: Talking about VoDs, today creators only have one option for managing their VoDs which is review and delete them all individually. This puts them in a really tough situation because there is a potential risk of keeping a huge number of VoDs on your channel but it also takes time to view the content in each VoD. To help with that, we are rolling out another update today that lets you select and unpublish VoDs and they are not visible on your channel but they are not gone forever. We will work on expanding this functionality so you can select a batch of VoDs and unpublish or delete them if you prefer. We hope to have this in the creator dashboard by the end of Q1.

Erin: So, on the topic of managing your content, let’s say that some music or content slips through while I am live. I obviously want to remove that specific content from my channel but I don’t want to have to delete it entirely. Right now, it’s that the option is really there that you have to just delete the whole stream. And so, the question we’ve gotten is Twitch working on a way to cut out specific parts of a VoD so that we don’t have to sacrifice the entire stream if we have to remove it from our channel.

Jeremy: This is where we use Audible Magic to help. It scans VoDs for copyrighted music and if it is detected it mutes that portion of the VoD which is obviously less disruptive than removing that section entirely. But you can also use the highlighter tool in the creator dashboard to select and remove segments of your VoD that you want to get rid of.

Erin: Audible Magic isn’t perfect. So, if you know that the content is there and you want to highlight the stream and do like a part one before the content and a part two after, you can definitely cut it up and keep it on your channel. So, if you haven’t done that, there is a help article to “Creating Highlights” on help.twitch.tv if you are interested in learning more. But let’s say that I do want to go ahead and delete the entire stream or a series of VoDs and clips from my dashboard, one question that we have heard multiple times is that I deleted content from my dashboard. But it’s still showing up on Twitch. Does that put my content and channel at risk?

Jeremy: I am glad someone asked this question because it gives us a chance to address this misinformation that we have been hearing. So, if you have deleted the content, you are not going to strike. If you have used twitch tools that deleted your content and it’s still viewable when you have received a strike against it, for example that it is a large job or and it needs additional time or there are other deletion jobs in progress, you will not receive the strike in those cases. It’s important to note that this doesn’t apply to content deleted by third party tools that may exist on Twitch’s system. That’s because we don’t manage the tools so we cannot verify the accuracy.

Erin: I am glad that we were able to verify and touch on that point. You mentioned Audible Magic just a few minutes ago. Do you have any updates?

Jeremy: As I mentioned we use Audible Magic right now to scan new clips and VoDs and we delete the entire clip or mute the segment of the VoD if copyrighted music is detected. We started using Audible Magic to go back and scan all historical clips that were made as well as all VoDs that were created before it was introduced in 2014. So, this scanning is ongoing but it will take time for Audible Magic to scan years and years of VoDs and clips. We will keep making progress but we expect the scanning to be done in about six months.

Erin: We did get a question about muted audio on the topic of Audible Magic and they wanted to know if a section of their VoD was muted on sound on stream is that the same as a DMCA notification? Some people get the two confused that if it’s muted does that mean that a takedown notice was filed? Can you clear that up?

Jeremy: So, there’s a difference between seeing a muted audio warning in your video and video producer dashboard and receiving a DMCA takedown notice. A muted VoD doesn’t mean that you have received a DMCA strike. It means that our end of Audible Magic detected copyrighted music and muted that segment of the VoD. This actually helps prevent the DMCA strike so it’s not an indication that you have received one or even going to receive one. That said, no technology is perfect and it is possible that it doesn’t pick up all copyrighted audio.

Slide 7: Notification Management — Today

Erin: Yes, we have said it a few times that it is a safety net but it doesn’t mean that it’s perfect. So, you can’t rely on that solely. You can’t put the content and assume that it’s going to catch 100%. These tools are there to try and help you in case something slips through, not to allow you to put content on your stream that you don’t have the rights to and then remove it later. But we talked about the confusion of knowing whether you got a strike or not or when a VoD has been muted, I think the last thing that we need to talk with you is our system for managing DMCA notifications and appeals and notifying streamers when they do receive those notifications. So, if you aren’t familiar right now Twitch sends DMCA notifications to creators in an email that contains the information like what content was removed, the content that was in violation and information about who filed the notification but honestly email is not a reliable system and it’s not creator friendly at all. So, can you share with the community today what we are doing to make it more clear for streamers when they receive a DMCA notification and what their options are after it happens.

Jeremy: Emails should not be the only channel we use for important notifications like this because as you mentioned it’s easy to miss an email or it’s for it to be sent to the spam folder. To build this we are going to build functionality.

Slide 8: Notification Management — In Development

That when you receive a takedown notification that you receive it on Twitch as well as an email. We expect to release this in the first half of 2021. But we also want to make it easier to navigate the entire DMCA process. In 2021, we are going to release a series of updates that will enable creators to learn when they have received a DMCA notification and review the content that was subject to that notification. Monitor the number of strikes that they have on their channel and even follow the count of notification if they believe that they have wrongly received the DMCA notification and it will all be done directly from the creative dashboard.

Erin: I think that’s going to be a pretty huge step not just for understanding the content but also making it easier to navigate. There’s just comfort in being able to feel informed about the current state of your channel. Understanding how many strikes that you have, being able to navigate those notifications and understand the content that received it. So, one of the questions that we also get specifically about DMCA strikes is that are strikes for a DMCA violation the same as strikes for violating Twitch’s terms of service? We haven’t really been clear about the difference between the two. So, I was hoping that you could clear that up.

Jeremy: Strikes that are received for DMCA violations are different than those received for terms and services violations including community guideline violations. For example, say you have received an enforcement for community guidelines or terms of service violation. This is separate and is not counted against DMCA infringement policy which purely concerns the number of DMCA notifications you have received. Likewise, if you have run a foul that is a repeat infringement policy DMCA strikes do not impact your ability to use Twitch products that require you to be in good standing like “Bounty Vault”.

Slide 9: Product Roadmap

Erin: I know that there were some streamers that weren’t aware of those nuances. So, I am glad that we were able to clear that up. I was hoping you could do a quick recap of the product roadmap.

Jeremy: Quick recap. So, we release free updates this week. We integrated “Soundtrack” for multiple audio technology into OBS 26.1. We gave editors access to manage clips. We added the functionality to let you unpublish individual VoDs. Next quarter we are going to continue to expand on VoD management functionality that will let you select a batch of VoDs to unpublish and delete and then in Q2 we are going to give users access to “Soundtrack”, “Multitracks”, audio technology in Twitch studio and we will be adding DMCA to the creative dashboard so you can receive notifications, review the content targeted in those notifications and track strikes without having to leave Twitch. In the second half of the year, we will enable sorting and deleting clips by date, game or view count and we will also introduce functionality that will let you unpublish all of your VoDs at once and file a canon notification directly from the creative dashboard.

Slide 10: Creator Camp Live Learning on Dec 22, 2020

And while all this is going on Audible Magic is going to continue scanning historical content and deleting clips or muting VoDs where it detects audio from its database and finally I want to remind everyone that we have a creative camp session.

Erin: So, switching gears, we covered DMCA now we are going to get to our second topic — trust and safety. So, joining us now is our chief operating officer Sara Clemens.

Sara: I run everything that focuses on taking the products that are launched. So, the type of things that Jeremy was discussing. So, the teams like partnerships or marketing, all of that corporate functions including trust and safety.

Erin: We are going to spend the bulk of our time in this segment talking about the Hateful Conduct and Harassment Policy. But before, I wanted to talk about the other improvements and progress that we have made this year to help keep our community safe. So, I want to give you a second to talk about what stands out to you this year.

Slide 11: Making Twitch a Safer Community

Slide 12: 2020 in Review

Sara: So, in terms of trust and safety, we have had a really big investment area in 2020. It’s a priority for us and it will absolutely continue to be a priority for us. This is a perpetual area of investment for us. I want to talk about a few policy updates.

We have heard this from the community. They wanted us to make the community guidelines clearer and to improve enforcement consistency. So, there’s really been a strong focus around those two objectives. We have issued several policy clarifications this year that have been specifically about addressing community feedback about issues such as drops farming and also suspension evasion. We have done it quite quickly because the issues that cropped up in real time and we wanted to address and issue clarification and provide as much clarity as possible. We did a much longer process and we overhauled nudity and attire policy. This has been a really hot topic for the community. We appreciate that there has been frustration around this in particular. And so, we did a lot of work and rolled that policy out to provide more clarity around what you were able to do in terms of nudity and attire. So, you can feel a bit more confident and understand exactly what was covered under the policy. And then, just to clarify that these policies are only effective if we can enforce them consistently and fairly. So, one of the big investments we have made in this space is that we have doubled our safety operations team in 2020 and it helped reduce the median response time by 96%. This is an area we will keep focusing on. Having really expeditious responses to reports critical to creating a robust trust and safety system. And we are not only adding more people to our trust and safety team but we are also adding some new expertise. So, particularly, we have focused on deepening our language coverage globally so that we can get quick responses in all the different languages around the globe. And we have also broken out a dedicated appeals team and a dedicated law enforcement team that helps us in having specialty around those particular areas. This is a perpetual area of investment for us. There is no end state when it comes to safety and we are really committed to it.

Erin: So, definitely making progress in enforcement and consistent response time. All the things that we hear from the community are a huge part in ensuring that Twitch is a safe place to be and a big step toward safety in general. But it’s’ definitely only a part of it, so can you give us a rundown of the tools that we have specifically launched this year to help with moderation on Twitch.

Sara: Moderation is just critical. We launched mod view to help in March which is a one-stop shop that we have created for mods on Twitch. And since we have launched it, over 40% of all moderations have gone through mod view. So, we are really excited about that.

Erin: You said things for mods and I thank all the moderators.

Sara: So, I am going to jump into more of the products. So, the first improvement is that we edit notifications for reporters. So, historically the reporter experience was a black ball. So, you would submit a report and then the only way you could tell if something had happened was if you saw some news on twitter or people chatting about it. And so, what we wanted to do was to ensure that when people are reporting they have full clarity around what happened. The safety of Twitch lies enormously on community reports. For us, making sure that you have clarity, really as part of just maintaining the robustness of this reporting system. Earlier in 2020, we launched a confirmation email. So, when you send the report now, you will get a confirmation email saying that we have received it. And just a couple of weeks ago, we started sending a notification. If action was taken for the reason you did in the report and you could close that loop. And so you actually know now that if the thing that you reported was upheld, we will give you a response to that confirming that. It’s important that the community feels confident that the reports you make are impactful. And I just want to take a moment and speak about this issue. Every report that is submitted is reviewed by a member of our team. This is a really important part of our trust and safety approach is that we want people to actually review these reports. And so we continue to invest in our team and in the first half of next year we are actually going to undertake some user research to understand how we can further improve the reporter experience.

Erin: I think it’s really important for people to understand the outcome of a report. They want to feel heard and they don’t want to know that the report just went into a void and had no impact. That if something happened, that Twitch took action on it. It’s super important.

Erin: And on the top of notifications, our team is also working on providing more detail if you are receiving enforcement against your account. So, if you or someone who is at the receiving end of enforcement, we will actually build providing a notification so that we include the content title, the creation dashboard, and the type of content that is being actioned upon.

Erin: By just saying that you violated our guidelines and not knowing what you did or what the content specifically was can be an incredibly frustrating situation especially if you are trying to appeal it and there’s not much info to go on. So, I am sure people will be really happy on both sides. If you are making a report or on the other side of a report we are working on building better communication and more transparency.

Slide 13: Hateful Conduct & Harassment Policy

Sara: The last thing I want to touch on is that we are involving the community in order to improve our approach to trust and safety. So, this has been a big area of investment for us and so we have really brought the community voice into the conversations that we have about trust and safety. What we can do better, what approach are we taking and what the stands in the community are. We have things like interviews, we have focus groups of community members. We do that around the globe and across different continent times. And we are also regularly tracking community sentiment. We use surveys, what we see on social media and also the use of voice. In addition to talking to the community, we also contact subject matter experts. So, academics we are considering, NGOs around the globe on specific topics like hateful conduct policy. And finally, a safety advisory council that we created this year. And they are great and are providing us with advice and feedback and it has been really valuable because they can give their unvarnished opinions on everything that we put in front of them and it’s really helped us identify areas that we can improve.

Erin: We are going to talk about all those things specifically as they relate to updates to hateful conduct and harassment policy. So we will touch on the specifics of those in the next section. But before we get into that, I wanted to remind everyone that the new policy for hateful conduct and harassment doesn’t go into effect until January 22nd of 2021. So, we have specifically set aside the next few weeks to give the community time to read the policy and understand what’s changing and in the meantime our safety team will continue to moderate the existing guidelines until that January 22nd date. So, Sara before we dive into the policy we have gotten some questions from the community and they wanted to know that if we understand that we have a policy, if we have a problem with harassment, why are we waiting over a month to release the new updates to the policy.

Slide 14: Policy will not go into effect Until Jan 22, 2021

Sara: First off, it’s important to remember that we have an existing policy in place. And that policy prohibits the kind of behavior under the hateful conduct and harassment policy and we will continue to enforce that during the education period. And so, it’s not that there is no policy in place. We wait up the education period really carefully. We were considering, “Do we implement it immediately or do we provide a buffer for the community?” We made a deliberate choice to give everyone an opportunity to fully understand and digest the policy before we started enforcing it. We were super conscious that for many of our creators this is their livelihood. And so, we didn’t want them to catch people off guard over a policy particularly during the holiday period. We take our community’s safety seriously. If we had thought that this education period would have resulted in any level of abuse we could have restrained, we absolutely would not have provided. We will still be monitoring all content under the existing policy.

Erin: There is so much in addition to the time period like educating the community about the policy. There’s so much that goes on behind the scenes that we are trying to make these decisions. Again, we will talk about that. But I think we should step back one step further and talk about why we even decided to make these updates. What happened was that we felt that we should revise and make new guidelines.

Sara: We are always looking for ways to help our creators and our communities to be safe when they are on Twitch.

Slide 15: Why Update the Policy?

And do that in a way that’s meeting the community’s needs. We heard from the community that there were some frustrations regarding the hateful conduct and harassment policy, specifically that the existing language was too broad. It didn’t provide enough clarification on how we actually enforce the policy. And that lack of clarification was distressing for people and so we were like this is something that we want to make sure that people have a really high degree of understanding about. We also heard from communities that it didn’t provide an adequate level of protection for some parts of our community, particularly women, black, LGBTQIA, disabled, and identities alone that specifically and unfortunately make them targets. Our mission at Twitch is about building a global economy of diverse multiple creators. We really want to ensure that gaming on Twitch is for everybody. And we know that being exposed to pervasive harassment or hateful conduct really inhibits the growth of the community and the well-being of our streamers. And so, with this update we really wanted to provide clarity on our expectations about being very explicit about what is allowed and what isn’t allowed. So, if you read through the policy, one of the most notable changes is that we have added a really long list of examples in every section. And if you go on to the Twitch site where the policy is, you can actually hover over the parts of the policy — you can see examples that will pop up and they will give you tangible and concrete examples that demonstrate how actually the policy might translate into your everyday experience on Twitch. Adding that level of specificity both to our external guidelines and also to our internal guidelines, we are able to eliminate some of that grey area that might have led to inconsistency or confusion in the past.

Erin: Making sure that we are consistent and everyone is understanding what those guidelines are is super important. And I think that you should reiterate that there are a lot of updates to the clarification but not necessarily changes to the policy. We are just being incredibly clear about how this may impact you. So, a lot of it doesn’t change and it’s just us being very specific. We had one more question — whether content created before the announcement will be held to the new policy because there is such a wide breadth of time between the announcement and the enforcement, how are we moderating against content that may have existed before that goes live.

Sara: This updated policy will only apply for content that is created after January 22nd. So, we don’t intend this to be applied for historical content. Sometimes mistakes can occur. But if you do receive a strike for what you believe is content that was created prior to the 22nd of Jan that were acceptable under our existing policy then please file an appeal so that we can look into it. We do not intend for people to be penalized for something that is new in the policy that is after January 22nd for the content that was created prior.

Erin: We have not consistently disclosed to the community how we make these decisions and I would really like to talk about it. The community wants to know if they are represented, especially if you are somebody being impacted by new and updated policies that somebody is bringing into the room your point of view or experience to ensure that this doesn’t have a negative impact on you. Can you talk about this specific round of policy updates as to who was involved and helped in making those decisions?

Slide 16: Policy Development Process

Sara: This is a big area of investment for us. We want to ensure that the community voice is part of our ongoing policy development process. And so, the internal team that drives the policy in tune with our internal research group, we conducted a range of interviews. They were both one to one and also focus groups where a group of creators and moderators around the globe and we talked to them about the kind of harassment that people experience on Twitch and how it affects them. And we wanted to ensure that there was a diverse sampling of creators, so we included a range of genders, people from different regions, different continents and focuses. What time they spend on Twitch, to get a really broad and representative view of the community. And this was just so helpful and us being able to understand what are the key pain points that the community feels and we need to address to ensure that the change that we made to the policy would actually provide protection for everybody. We have also built a sort of arm of effort across the business which is how we tap into experts around the industry. So, in addition to talking to our community and having people internally, what are the external experts that we can talk to. So, these are academics around the globe, we have talked to civil society groups, safety groups, and specifically in fields who consider things like cyber bullying or diversity and inclusion and ensuring how the best practices for helping build a healthy community can actually enhance what we do on Twitch.

Erin: One of the points that you talked about was about historical context, current cases and review, blending into how we decide to make these updates. One of the questions that we saw across Twitter specifically when we announced the updates to the policy was coming, the community wanted to know whether this was Twitch’s response to the sexual misconduct allegations that we saw over the summer.

Sara: So, we had actually started working on the policy change well prior to that. This is all being across the year in making but the info that we gathered is part of the investigation that we took into those allegations. It gave us visibilities in the ways in which sexual harassment can actually differentiate from other forms of abuse. And it influenced that decision to distinguish sexual harassment as a different category and break it out and also to adopt the lower tolerance ratio that you see in the policy for objectifying or harassing behavior that is sexual in nature.

Erin: So, now that we have the context into why we make policy updates, how we make them and we are very clear about where we are from those aspects. Let’s really get into the details. So, the current policy is broken out into the three areas, hateful conduct, harassment and sexual harassment. Why specifically those three areas?

Slide 17: Update Provides More Detail

Sara: Once we completed our research we understood that there is no one size fits all solution here and so, we decided to break the categories out into distinct sub-sections. So, harassment, hateful conduct and following the events of the summer, we broke sexual harassment out as a third category. We did that to reflect and to ensure that we can consider the different situations with a lot more specificity than we are able to when they are all combined together. It was really important with the sexual harassment category to allow our teams to take decisive actions around those behaviors. This also allows us to give specific examples which were much harder when they were all combined together. So, again when you look at the policy you can see those breakouts, we have added very specific examples to each of the types of behaviors. And we are hopeful that it will help achieve greater clarity across the policy.

Erin: The older policy was super generic in language and very broad ways and it encapsulated one area that was incredibly dense. So, I think it makes sense to break them out. I think we should go through one by one, each of those sections today and provide an overview as to what’s been updated in each section. So, let’s start with the harassment section since it’s the first part of the policy. What are the key things that the community should know when it comes to updates and changes in that area?

Slide 18: Definition of Harassment

Sara: Based on our research and the feedback that we gathered from all those conversations that we had around the globe that streamers really had a stable and consistent definition of what harassment was that aligned with our existing guidance. The harassment section of our new policy is not a massive departure from where we are today. However, we have added a lot of details so there’s a lot of examples and we have done that to really make it clear that what it is that we consider harassment and provide examples to bring that to life.

Erin: At the very top of that bullet is something that we hear a lot from the community all the time is that there is a nuanced and kind of really important part of conversation that relies on context that there is difference between banters and trash talks and harassments. Those are all different things. And that concern is largely based on the idea or the potential for streamers receiving a suspension for something that was good-natured but was reported for harassment.

Sara: This was probably the biggest issue that we grappled with. We got a lot of feedback from the community that they wanted to have in-jokes, and talk to each other and these sort of banter and memes and inside jokes and we wanted to ensure that we didn’t stop people being able to do that. What we were focused on is that sometimes, those behaviors can cross a line and then they rise to the level of harassment. And so, what we have decided is that in order to evaluate that we will actually consider a number of different factors. And specifically is there an indication that the behavior is unwanted or makes someone uncomfortable. And those indications might be things like timeouts, reports or chat bans from one of the moderators. And those indications give us the necessary context to ensure that we are not punishing people for banter or teasing or competitive trash talk that is actually comfortable for people who are participating in that particular discussion. But I do want to emphasize that there are bounds across Twitch about what is and is not acceptable. And so as creators, as community members, it’s important to remember that there may be behaviors that you may be comfortable with but they are not acceptable to the broader Twitch community. So, we do have what we think is kind of a threshold in terms of behavior and there is a limit to that exception of allowing indications of comfort around the particular conversation. And so, we are constantly weighing the perspective of the reporter and content for review for each determination and the thing that we are hopeful for is that we anticipate these challenges will actually improve the enforcement consistency as they reduce subjectivity in the review process.

Erin: If somebody does something in your channel that makes you uncomfortable, or if you witness something that you absolutely feel empowered to take action, so somebody does something, definitely time them out and ban them and especially report it. A lot of times, somebody will come into chat and say something and you are like, that feels like harassment to me and you ban and that’s where it stops. But we rely on the community to report those actions for us so that we can take those actions and I am glad that it comes in now. On the opposite side of the issue though, we have another question from the community that I know came across social media for sure which is that “What happens if somebody falsely claims to be offended? That they didn’t actually take offense and they were reporting and banning in bad faith and they wanted somebody just to get into trouble. How do we determine that and what do we do about it?”

Sara: Even if we are given an indication from a targeted user, we don’t suspend for behavior that does not violate the harassment policy. So, for example when someone is egging you on and then reporting and review of the content demonstrates that it was in bad faith and so we don’t want to penalize someone who is trying to get into the system to try and get someone into trouble, we do always take that into account. But if you did make a comment and you are asked to stop, and it was in violation of the harassment guidelines, then there could be grounds for enforcement and so I just encourage people for like if you don’t have a relationship with the other person and you are unsure about what kind of tolerance about specific kinds of behavior are it’s probably best to avoid them.

Erin: Can you cover what has changed in hateful conduct?

Slide 19: Hateful Conduct

Sara: So, harassment becomes hateful conduct when you target someone on the basis of a predicted and usually identified characteristic. And so, in this policy change we have expanded our list of particular characteristics and it included caste, color and immigration status. And the reasoning for that is that we want to evolve with the community and we heard from the community that they felt these were particular characteristics that were not included in our previous policy and we really needed to step up and include them. So, we have done that. And then similarly to the harassment section it’s a very similar approach and we have added a lot of illustrative examples. So, all these behaviors were implied in the policy that we have in place now but they weren’t explicitly called out and we have made the effort to break these out for you so it gives you more tangible ideas as to how these policies are actually interpreted.

Erin: I think that section was brief and it didn’t accurately portray the amount of severity that we put on making sure that there is no hateful conduct on Twitch and nobody experiences that behavior. So, now let’s move on to the sexual harassment section.

Slide 20: Sexual Harassment on Twitch

Sara: The first thing is that we have broken it out of harassment. So, this new policy really talks about behavior that could be objectifying or abusive and it makes it clear that they are never permitted on Twitch. Because of this, our trust and safety team will act in requirement based on any indication from the targeted behaviors that are unwanted. This is a really notable and important change and a critically important one because what it does is that it takes the onus of the victim of that behavior to report it and so community reports around that and review from our trust and safety team ascertaining that it did indeed breach the community guidelines around sexual harassment enabling us to act upon it. We have also limited things like repeatedly commenting on someone’s parents if they have asked you to stop and also making explicit comments about someone’s sexuality. I honestly hope that some of those sounds like common scenes but we wanted to ensure that everybody was crystal clear about our expectations of the behaviors that we expect when you are part of the Twitch community.

Erin: I know that there will be communities that will be glad to see that these changes are being rolled into effect but I think that it’s fair to say that there is skepticism about our ability to provide consistent safety. We have mentioned multiple times that we are trying to improve the consistency there and so one of the questions is what we are doing specifically to improve the consistency across our enforcements so that it is fairer to users across the board.

Sara: We absolutely acknowledge the fact that our policies are as good as their enforcements. Enforcement consistency is a priority for us. I know this has been a real pain point for the community historically and we might have actually talked at Twitch con last year and we explained as part of the reason that historically we had issues with consistency is that we had different teams managing trust and safety across the business. And that just inevitably leads to inconsistency. And so, there is different interpretation of policies and so last year we actually brought all those teams together and we are putting in place these new policies that have global training processes and wherever possible we are trying to remove subjectivity from the system because subjectivity is the thing that creates inconsistency. And consistency absolutely starts with having clear guidelines. It’s absolutely essential to us to be able to run a trust and safety system that is consistent with everybody. And so, one of the reasons why we updated this policy is that the broad language that we had in the previous policy had made enforcement decisions really confusing because it wasn’t clear to the community what specific behavior was prohibited. The effort that we have made to clarify and provide all these examples means that both internally and externally we are able to remove some of the objectivity in the review process. And the second thing from a consistency perspective is that we have been scaling up our safety operations team and the team has had an enormous amount of training over the course of the last year and that’s a really important aspect in terms of ensuring that they understand how the new policy should be applied to new content. What the nuances are of it, we provide examples to the safety team when they are looking at content. And our safety operations team will be placing more emphasis on the content of the words and actions rather than the intent. So, you may recall that our historical approach was that we would look at the intent behind the content that had been reported. And that actually makes it more subjective because everybody thinks about intent differently. So, we have moved to considering the content and reviewing it against community guidelines. And that makes it much simpler for the safety of our team. Every report that you send to Twitch is reviewed by a member of our safety team. And we are really committed to the human review. We really believe that humans are best placed to assess the context and the meaning of content and that can vary enormously from country to country. Our teams can understand and identify nuances that can have a significant impact on meaning in a particular language. This is a human process and we are absolutely committed to minimizing our mistakes but we also have an appeals process in place to ensure that if they do happen, they are fixed.

Erin: It definitely is a conversation that we are building out our ability to provide more information to you if you are on the receiving end of moderation action and if something happens you do have the ability to raise it to us. Before we move on, there is a trust and safety related topic that we haven’t covered here and it’s not necessarily covered in the policy but it is something that we commonly get and it’s really important for us to cover. And it’s that the community wants to know what Twitch is doing to curb the creation of usernames that are made purely for the purpose of harassing other streamers or viewers on Twitch.

Sara: It falls into two categories. One is, what can we do with technology and the other is, what can we do with humans. From the tech perspective, we have an efficient machine learning model that runs on all our nearly proposed usernames. So, if you create a new username, we let you run that through a technology system that will review it and block abusive names from being created. We also maintain as a part of that, a list of slurs and phrases that will be blocked as usernames as well. Machine learning is a great tool but it doesn’t necessarily understand the nuance of language and so we did a specific list of debiasing look earlier this year to train it, to allow more positive implications of LGBTQIA and black identity and so we want to use technology to be effective but it does require these kinds of trainings and investments. We also act on reports of offensive usernames. And those that are found in violation of our community guidelines are indefinitely suspended. So, on the proactive detection model, that’s based on actions and reports, so it does matter. I really encourage you to review usernames that may not have gone through the system and if you could report those to us because that report actually helps us in improving our technology’s proactive detection and it’s really essential to it. On the human side, we also have a team dedicated to preventing that on Twitch. We don’t talk about what they do because the objective of this team is to stay ahead of bad actors.

Erin: I know that they are the unseen heroes behind the scenes and I know it can be frustrating for the community and we get a lot of questions about, do you do this, do you try this technology and there is sometimes a specific reason why we don’t tell you that and it’s so that people don’t figure out how to circumvent that.

Slide 21: Enforcement Begins Jan 22, 2021

Erin: So, the final topic of today’s session is ads. So, some of you may have attended the ads seminar that we hosted specifically for partners about a month ago and I am specifically excited about this part because right now we are going to review all of the information that we included in our partner webinar so that the entire community is in the know including updates in the past few weeks and show you things are to come. Mike Minton is going to guide us through the ad experience.

Mike: I am going to discuss with the community about advertising and the future.

Erin: Before getting started, I want to talk about what sparked the conversation about ads which was the automated experiment that we ran a few months ago and I think that the most common question that we get is why did even Twitch decide to do that experiment.

Mike: Anytime we are making any change to the side of ad experience, we are starting with some kind of customer problem and what we had heard consistently from streamers is even if ads seemed interesting and the revenue that could be earned there is a perception that there is a disadvantage. If I run ads and other streamers aren’t running ads, I may lose my audience because nobody else is running ads. It was also grounded in an understanding that the streamers that were running ads started with, many of them were using automated tools, running ads on a timer basically. So, the combination of those two things informed a solution where we would automate the ad breaks to level out across the ad load across Twitch and reduce the burden on streamers to have to remember to hit the ad button. While they are using third party tools that’s hard to remember running ads in the midst of everything else that a streamer is doing to create amazing content to build a community. And so, for us bringing the timer on the platform, putting the burden on Twitch, honestly we expected that the community would be largely angry at Twitch. What we learned is that the control in our mind was that a streamer can choose to run ad breaks. If a streamer runs an ad break the automated midrolls won’t run. That wasn’t enough. Consistent feedback from streamers said that we needed even more controls than that. Even when they used timers, what we heard from them is that they are still adjusting the ad running to avoid it running in the middle of a boss fight. Nobody wants to get an ad when you are about to down a boss. Our goal was to get feedback and learn and that’s where we are.

Erin: We definitely heard all of them and even with all that feedback I think it’s still fair for us to answer this question because the community is going to ask whether the automated midroll experiment is going to come back?

Mike: The experiment that we ran and as per the feedback it’s not coming back. The feedback was quite clear which indicated it won’t be smart for us to put it back out there. But we are going to continue to experiment to make the ad experience more consistent across Twitch. Our north star vision is most ads on Twitch are midroll ads run in a streamer-initiated ad break. We have more things coming, we will be more transparent, and we will obviously think a lot more about the viewer experience to ensure that they are not missing out on those important moments.

Erin: I think it’s really good for the community to know that we do think about the future of ads that we are dedicated to making sure that there are less interest (??). We will talk about more of those core tenants in a little bit but at the end of the day, ads are incredibly important to the ecosystem of Twitch. So, I would love for the community to hear directly from you.

Slide 22: Subs and Bits support creators and our service

Mike: Everybody typically brings up subs and bits. We love those products, the community loves those products but not everybody can afford to pay, not everybody wants to pay on Twitch. So, the other thing to keep in mind is the viewer journey. It often takes a long time for a viewer to discover a community that works for them, that aligns with their interest and are ready to support by taking out their wallet. Subs and bits were great for the community, where there is a lot of engagement between the community and the streamer and less well when you get into very large communities, chats moving faster, a cheer might not even get noticed. So, as the channel grows, ads become a much bigger part of how the community is supported. So, if you think about from a streamer’s perspective ads generate revenue, paid for by brands versus viewers where brands are paying for this opportunity to reach this awesome audience and community. Ads grow with the channel, and then frankly it allows us to provide the infrastructure and bandwidth and services to support Twitch experience. Simply said, they pay our bills and keep Twitch free.

Erin: There is a definite misconception from the community and we do hear this quite often that Twitch doesn’t need ad revenue because we make enough money from our splits of bits and subs.

Mike: The truth is that ads scale. Bits and subs and paid products do not scale the same way ads do in terms of scaling. And when I say scale, I am talking about all kinds of content across different types from esports to community-created content and different countries around the world and different community sizes. So, ads scale. And as twitch grows, ads become more important in terms of the value they provide. When streamers grow, it becomes more important to them and their earnings and their ability to make a living by doing what they love. So, we have to have both and we are balancing them. So, it allows Twitch to be the place where streamers get paid creating and building a community around things that they love whether it’s a day two streamer with one concurrent viewer who might be their friend, trying to grind their way to affiliate or whether they are partners that have been on the platform and the service for seven years and have thousands of viewers every time they stream. So, we are here to support all streamers who have the products and resources to do that and that’s why we need to have both forms of monetization in terms of direct paid as well as the advertising. We are an independently operated business. We built a high definition, low latency, globally available streaming experience. So, operating that, maintaining it, growing it as the community grows, has significant operating costs. So, ads are really the underlying way that we are able to keep Twitch freely available and stay in business and ensure that we keep building that service, growing it, and rolling out new tools for streamers.

Erin: Yeah, the high definition, low latency, global experience can get quite costly on bigger channels and then you add all the channels who are just starting out on Twitch and who don’t have those monetization products enabled, there’s a lot of costs associated with that. Ads are really an important part of keeping that technology going. As a viewer when I come to Twitch what should my expectation be as a viewer with regards to ad experience?

Slide 23: Types of Ads

Mike: There’s definitely a lot of confusion about what to expect and what ads are run by Twitch versus streamers. So, today pre-rolls are twitch-initiated. So, you are discovering new channels and you happen to find a new stream, you will often be experienced with a pre-roll before that stream starts. And then you will also see beyond that pre-roll and then some channels and not all channels, streamer-initiated ad break. And when streamers are running those ad breaks, it’s really important to understand that they consistently run mid-rolls, it removes the pre-roll from the experience. So, if they run 90 seconds of ad every half hour, it will remove pre-rolls from that channel.

Erin: I think that the pre-roll experience on a channel is something that people might expect but mid-rolls like when it’s going to come, when should I expect it, are confusing to the community and viewers. I think I have an indication of why that might be but I think the community would love to hear from you.

Slide 24: Mid-roll Ads

Mike: It gets back to that inconsistent point. Not all streamers are running ads and many viewers watch the same channels consistently when they go to experience a new channel and see an ad break, it’s very confusing. I see this on social media as to why there were seven pre-rolls? But the truth is there wasn’t. You entered a channel when an ad break was being run and it was surprising and unusual. But when you see the longer ad pods, it’s a streamer-initiated ad break after pre-roll.

Erin: And sometimes, those ads aren’t seven thirty second ads, sometimes they are seven shorter ads but the length of the time is determined by the streamer who is running that mid-roll and that length of time can be 90 seconds, it can be a minute, it can be a different varying amount of time and so both the number of ads doesn’t necessarily correlate with time and understanding what happened can be confusing. But because a lot of streamers aren’t manually running their ad breaks, mid-roll ads are somewhat of a new experience for the community even though the number of ads total that you will experience on Twitch is still much less that other video-based services. But since mid-rolls are controlled by creators, we see concerns from streamers all the time who aren’t necessarily opposed to running ads and obviously everyone wants to increase monetization and make more money, but there’s an underlying fear that if I am a streamer and I run ads, I am going to lose viewers. And I know that you have got some data and insights to talk about the numbers.

Mike: It’s something that we have shared with streamers to help them educate and make them aware.

Slide 25: Insight into Ads

But the reality is, first of all, most viewers absolutely stay, they understand ads support streamers and they don’t leave or switch channels. But if you compare a mid-roll versus a pre-roll, the community is five times more likely to stay through a mid-roll. The immediate question that typically follows is that if I run a two-minute ad break of multiple ads, does that mean that it adds up? No, what happens is that viewers once they make it through the first break, there is increasing likelihood that they will stay through the entire break. Streamers are educating the audience and letting them know. The picture-by-picture experience also helps here because if the streamer actually gets out of their chair, they can see the empty chair and they know that they are not missing out. And streamers and the community will stick around. So, that’s why we created the mid-roll, pre-roll trade so that new viewers can get into your channels more easily while still maintaining equal or similar amounts of inventory. And then the viewers can immediately see your content.

Erin: I think for people who are coming into streaming for the first time, they want to stay and want to experience the channel to see what you have. So, if you are regularly running those breaks when it’s convenient. Running those 90 second ads to disable those pre-rolls, that retention ends up being higher in the long run because they are able to get into chat. Streamers want to know can I actually make real money? Is there money to be made running ads on Twitch?

Slide 26: Revenue Increase for Streamers from Running Mid-roll Ads

Mike: They absolutely can. And we brought some data here to show and it’s kind of varied by the amount of ads and the community size of course and by country honestly as well. We are going to start from the left and work our way right. A smaller streamer that has 11–100 working partners at this point, and are consistently running affiliate and we are running three minutes of ads an hour which is far less than any other ad-supported content site on the internet, there’s 3–6% increase if you consistently run ads and you remove the pre-rolls. You get the benefit of a little more money and the pre-rolls are gone. But one way to think about these sizes of community is that another sub or two which gets added up. It’s meaningful, it gives more equipment for the stream, helps you on your journey to become a larger community. Then if we go into mid-sized, at this point, 101–4000 is a very large range, that’s our partners, our growing partners, communities and if they are running three minutes of ads, they are going to increase their take-home pay up to 28% by consistently running ads and also with the removal of pre-roll benefit. And finally, it’s no secret that ads tend to work better at larger sized communities and it’s up to a 48% increase in revenue. And once your community is used to ads, and you can incorporate those into your content, and increasing that a little bit then you will start to see even more in terms of potential revenue up to a 120% by running 5 minutes of ad, still less than YouTube and many other sites.

Erin: Start with disabling the pre-rolls, have the conversation with your community. You should ensure what works for your content. We are trying to give you more tools to be able to do that. But, even with all the tools, with all the improvements that we are making to ads in the future, the ability for creators to earn money in doing ads is still impacted by other things that viewers can be doing in a negative way. We have seen a lot of conversations about how ad blockers are impacting the ad experience on twitch?

Slide 27: Ad Blockers on Twitch

Mike: It’s important to understand that oftentimes, ads blockers prevent the streamers from getting paid. The ads are nearly always delivered but because we can’t track it, it unfortunately impacts the streamer and their ability to earn from that ad view. So, the other thing that we have seen recently is that the way in which ad blockers and third-party scripts are trying to modify the site, it results in things that we come to watch on Twitch TV. But I am already on twitch tv. That’s not the expected experience and in those cases, we suggest that you check things you may have installed. We have a published help page that you can learn more about and we can encourage you to go and look there if the ad experience hasn’t been what we are talking about today.

Erin: Ultimately what the community is anxious to learn about is what the future of ads look like.

Mike: We always start with the streamer. And so, when we talk about the future it’s what more controls can we give to streamers and how can we make advertising more lucrative. How can we help that impact their take-home pay? Then we think about the viewer side of it, it’s live content, we don’t have time outs. We really need to have them not disrupt the content and that starts with the streamer running ad breaks. From the viewer side, we want the ads to be relevant and personalized and enmeshed with the content and we can’t forget the advertisers. They are the folks that are putting out the money here to buy advertising on Twitch and in that case, the ads must be attractive and it must represent their brands and it must be effective. They need to work. They want to see engagement, brand lift. So, by balancing the needs of these three customers, the streamer, the viewer and advertisers, that would result in more advertisers spending on twitch which results in streamers earning more money. And for the viewers that don’t want to pay or can’t pay it helps them to support the community.

Slide 28: A more controllable and lucrative experience for streamers

Teams are working on for a while and iterating with some streamers now which is really a much better on twitch offering that helps schedule and manage your ad breaks. It’s called ad manager and the other thing is that it’s not there now but it’s coming is to help connect if I do this ad running behavior what the impact will be to my earnings.

Erin: Some people might have had a sneak peek when it appeared on streamers’ dashboard once. I am glad that we are finally talking about it. It will be helpful for us to understand if the Ads Manager will be available for everyone including both partners and affiliates.

Mike: It sure will. Ad manager has started testing with certain creators now and early in 2021 it should be available to all creators, every streamer that is eligible to run ads will have access to this tool.

Erin: One bullet point that you mentioned was less interruptive. I think something we can agree on is that if ads are going to run, we don’t want it to disrupt the viewer experience.

Slide 29: Experiment — A less Disruptive Viewer Experience

Mike: It’s important to understand that advertisers are paying to interrupt. So, video advertising is the core of what we do. It is interruptive and the only way to not interrupt the content is for it to be a streamer-initiated ad break where it’s woven into the content. But what we are also saying is what I suggested about the ad load earlier is that we still feel that it is quite competitive in a good user experience within live content, we want to add to that. To give streamers more options and more types of formats. I have seen a lot of people suggest this on social media, etc. We want to integrate more display advertising which by its nature is less interruptive. It still provides great value to the three customers that I mentioned. It may refer to something referred to as the squeeze back format. This basically brings the video player back about 70% of its original size for some amount of time, gets the message out, the audio and video remain, it doesn’t interrupt the stream and then it will revert back after the message has been delivered. So, this is one format, there are three or four here. Instead of an L, it might be across the bottom and there might be also opportunities with what we call IEB standard units, these are the units that are bought and sold on the internet where a lot of advertisers are using them will also be shown. With any new ad product, especially something like a squeeze back that is not a standard ad format that advertisers are already buying, there can be time towards convincing them that there can be great value for our community and works on our site, and for them to understand the format, understand the effectiveness and buy it, so you will often see us put things out there, iterate, learn and then see it scale.

Erin: I am sure it will be available to all partners and affiliates when it goes out?

Mike: Yeah, absolutely. None of these ideas are segmented for any specific streamers. We want to get these ad formats and tools in the hands of every streamers. Much of the alternate squeeze-back type formats as well as the ad manager we are looking at March-April time frame in 2021.

Erin: Speaking about brands, the last thing that you mentioned was, really wanting to incorporate that into the experience so that they can advertise on Twitch. And when they do that, they really want to take advantage of this crazy, wonderful place that we love and call home, and that’s because we are engaging, it’s a live format and unique, what are we doing that helps them do those things in fun and unique and engaging ways?

Slide 30: Multiplayer Ads — Better for Advertisers and Creators

Mike: You are seeing our new multiplayer ad format. What we tried to do here was build a really engaging ad format and in this case, the advertiser can use their normal video ad creative but round it in some fun, amusing twitch community engagement. So, there are kind of three parts to this — there is a two way interaction, so multiplayer rewards the community for interacting with brands. So, the brand gets more information beyond whether the video was shown or not and they also in this case the brands get direct market feedback. We will often see this interaction in the form of a poll which can ask things like what’s your favorite flavor. So, it’s really a fun and engaging content around a brand message of course and the streamer benefits because they are rewarded when the community engages and, in this case, they are rewarded with a number of bits based on the engagement of the community. So, we think this is fun, probably one of the best examples of balancing the needs of streamers, advertisers and viewers. And one important lucrative thing is that early data shows that on average if a streamer runs a multiplayer ad versus a 60 second ad break it’s 37% more revenue to the streamer due to that community mechanic engagement. And that will vary based on how engaging the community is or isn’t. So, they are also controllable, streamers decide when to run them. We are testing it and rolling out, it’s now available to 3,000 streamers which is quite a bit more than what it was in the week prior, mobile users are now able to vote on the poll and finally, I talked about that retention piece earlier. The early data shows us that the audience is even more likely to stay with this type of advertising experience then the streamer initiated standard mid-roll.

Erin: Why don’t we launch skippable ads, why aren’t we talking about that here today?

Mike: We are looking at many new formats, and the skippable ad economy isn’t that great in terms of what the revenue will be to the streamer, it’s far less but you can imagine that we will continue to test it. We will see and find out which will then establish the value to the advertiser but there are other things like snoozing, allowing viewers to pool their ad watching into a time that is convenient to them. We are going to continue to iterate, talk to the community, but at the end of the day, help streamers earn revenue via advertising.

Questions and Answer Session:

Erin: So, before we head into our Q&A, there is one last area that we heard and saw on twitter we saw lots of feedback coming out of the Twitch con keynote, since most of what we are covering today and talked about only a select few areas of the thing that are happening on Twitch, the community ask, so now that everyone on Twitch is working from home, what actually has Twitch done this year. And the answer is, quite a lot. Our teams have been hard at work delivering new features and updates to the community across all of the areas of Twitch. So, a couple of things that I specifically wanted to highlight is one of the things that we truly worked hard on is improving the tools to the streamers. So, few things that really stand out to me is the fact that we have released an improved watch-parties, which includes adding in picture by picture, which was highly requested for our video and audio support, and releasing to creators across the globe. We have improved Twitch Studio in a number of ways, which is our own broadcasting software by bringing it to Mac, which is so wonderful for varying creatives across out of streaming space and added ton of new features like Chroma key, chrome vault, Vulcan game capture, streamed act interaction, chat overlay, so many things are available for people who are wanting to break into streaming utilizing Twitch Studio. We also expanded the ways for streamers and their communities can interact on stream. These are things like channel points which generally became available in December of last year, but since then we have continued adding new features to that like community challenges per user limits, and cool downs. Most recently we launched predictions. If you haven’t seen predictions, they are very wild. I would highly suggest you find a channel who runs them. And we also continuously work on improving the chat experience, including the current check chat history; and a number of changes that make fast moving chat more adjustable for the streamers and for the viewers that are watching. Those are just a number of things. It’s the tip of the iceberg. I was given the entire list. So, I am challenged, like to rattle off as many as I can in a minute. So, I just want you to understand that we have a lot of things that we are working on that includes high train for both web and mobile, celebrations which included two different beats, including commerce interaction, limited time e-modes for hyper skate private, holidays, new emotes, including emote auto resizer, tier two and tier three modifiers to emails analytics, and now default emotes which you can use if you don’t have your emotes, providing them for you; it’s super awesome; feedback to reporters. So, now you