Intro
The currently leading live streaming platform Twitch has revamped its mature content labelling. It now adds a far more detailed classification of the mature labels such as swearing, gambling, and sexual-related content.
The reasoning behind this is most likely due to the recent close Kick Twitch competition as a live streaming platform. The Kick live streaming platform has recently been riding a jump in popularity due to its insane xQc kick deal which Kick pays a total amount of $70 million and up to $100 million with an incentive to the internet streamer xQc to stream non-exclusively on Kick.
Description
Ever since its launch, Twitch has always had the option for streamers to mark their channel as mature which limits the audience who can watch the streamers’ stream to only users above 18 years old. However, there have yet been any silver lines that put details about this feature which left many to be confused about what it does and whether they should enable them or not which led to the feature to be rarely used.
It got even more confusing when back in September 2022 Twitch enforced its platform community guideline to ban any form of gambling content. At that time, this resulted in online gambling sites such as Stake.com and Rollbit.com receiving quite a hit on their exposure as streamers on Twitch was unable to stream its content anymore.
Back in August last year, another even more questionable stuff also happened on its platform where Twitch streamer has sex on stream under the “just chatting” category. At that time, the streamer did receive a ban however the said ban was then lifted only after just a week meanwhile another Twitch streamer under the name JiDion has received a permanent ban due to the alleged misogynist behaviour towards another streamer despite already made a clarification.
There are still various piles of unpopular decisions such as the 50:50 split, various new ad policies and so on which led to the slow downfall of the platform. Its closest competition at the moment is Kick streaming, a live streaming platform similar to Twitch which is ironically backed by Stake itself.
Kick is currently popularly known for its lax in restriction; including the permit of streaming gambling content as well as a very generous split between streamer and the platform which is a remarkable 95:5 split. Obviously this results in some already existing Twitch streamers flocking out to the new platform as well as new streamers who want to gamble out in the new promised land.
Looking at Kick’s popularity, it’s not even a surprise that Twitch ends up backpedalling from its previous community guidelines by introducing the new mature content revamp which they dubbed Content Classification Labels.
The new Content Classification Labels include as follows:
- Mature-Rated Games
- Sexual Themes
- Drugs, Intoxication, or Excessive Tobacco use
- Violent and Graphic Depictions
- Significant Profanity or Vulgarity
- Gambling
Twitch also mentions that this labelling is mandatory and will result in a warning if the streamers fail to label their stream correctly. According to the blog post, after the 20th of July, streamers who repeatedly fail to label their contents correctly will also receive a locked-in label; which means that a certain label will be inflicted on the streamers’ stream and is unable to be removed for days and even weeks.
Bottom line
The currently popular streaming platform has introduced a revamp on its mature content policy which is now dubbed as Content Classification Labels. Some of the new labels include uses of significant profanity or vulgarity, playing mature-rated games, as well as previously banned content which is a gambling stream.
Streamers who repeatedly fail to label their contents accordingly will receive a locked-in label which locks their stream to a certain label for a period of time.
The sudden change of this policy seems likely to be influenced by Twitch Kick competition. Kick is a similar if not the same streaming platform to Twitch which currently is on the rise and is well known for its lax in restrictions.
