Bloomberg reports that Twitch is offering YouTube creators large sums of money to stream their videos on its platform instead. As a response, YouTube is offering to pay creators for not sharing their videos on other platforms.

Twitch is a site known for video streaming of games. It has a much smaller audience than YouTube, and therefore is seeking to enlarge their footprint. By doing so it will need to encroach on YouTube's turf. Some creators who have been contacted say Twitch is offering as much as a few million dollars a year, as well as a share of the future advertising sales and subscription revenue if they created content for them instead of for YouTube.

Gigi Gorgeous and actor, now vlogger and influencer, Will Smith, have been approached. Tanner Braungardt, a YouTuber who pranks people, has signed on to Twitch with more than 4 million YouTube subscribers.

It's an interesting time fo online video. YouTube has been changing their algorithm which didn't favor some creators, and some videos weren't allowed to feature adverts, which is essentially one of the reasons for being a YouTuber in the first place.

It's a start of what I think can be great competition for YouTube, and will surely be good for us, the creators and viewers of online video. It's going to take a while for me to switch over to another video provider, but I'm open to the idea, and if creators are better looked after, they'll produce even better content with larger budgets.