In an August study by Streamlabs, YouTube was outpacing Twitch’s user growth but lagging behind in monetization. This is a major problem for gamers who make a living off of their streams and gameplay. It has been far more efficient to build a presence on Twitch than YouTube primarily because of Twitch’s Subscription service. For $4.99 a month, fans can support their favorite creators and gain access to subscriber only perks such as private discord servers and unique emotes.

Since imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, all of these features appear to have been carbon copied by YouTube.

According to an official blog post, eligible YouTube Gaming creators can now receive sponsorships from their fans. Notably, this feature is specifically being rolled out for gaming channels first but may soon be a part of the main YouTube ecosystem.

The primary reason creators use YouTube is for Video On-Demand while Twitch specializes in Live Streaming. However, both of these platforms require a major time investment of which most professionals can’t spare. Many have resorted to uploading long segments from streams to their YouTube channels for this very reason.

The incentives to repurpose content from Twitch on YouTube goes deeper. While most people use Subscribers and Views as a metric to judge the success and profile of a YouTuber, the primary metric YouTube’s algorithm uses when selecting recommended content is neither of those things.

Behind the scenes, YouTube has looked to maximize watch time since 2012.

Gameplay videos are not only easy to watch in long sessions, but they are relatively easy to produce. Recycling content from Twitch only serves to maximize the utility of the content. By encouraging streaming on YouTube and giving pros another way to monetize through subscriptions, YouTube is looking to move this content to a single location. This is clearly YouTube attempting migrate creators from the dominant platform back to their own.

/02 YouTube Analytics Now Provides creators with Subscriber Sources