One of the thornier issues that have recently been causing waves in the online video review industry has been the question of paid-for and sponsored content. Content creators and livestreamers often need these sorts of deals to continue to operate their businesses, but understandably the viewers are worried about if being paid by the same companies making the games means that the reviews could be biased in favour of the games’ companies.

Twitch has obviously seen these issues raging recently because they’ve taken the decision to lay down some guidelines so that viewers can be better informed if a stream has been ‘paid for’ by someone other than the viewers tuning in. They announced the new measures in a blog post, calling the sponsored streams “influencer campaigns”.

It explains that thanks to a lack of clear-cut practices in how to declare paid-for content, it has led to such things becoming a “dark corner of the industry” with viewers not knowing whose opinions to trust and the content creators themselves becoming conflicted over whether they should accept deals or not even if they need the money.

“Gamers can tend to look skeptically on the video ecosystem because they don’t know what is paid-for content and what is not,” reads Twitch’s blog. “It also opens influencers to potential criticism.”

This is not just a Twitch issue, although there are rules stating that paid-for content needs to be declared somewhere the viewing public can see; ‘somewhere they can see’ is a very vague term and can often lead to the Youtube description version of ‘small print’ being used (i.e. it’s hidden at the bottom of a description box and there only). There are no clear guidelines for how exactly sponsored content is declared.

Because of this, Twitch have set the following guidelines in place for influencer campaigns in future:

• Twitch will clearly identify all sponsored content.
• Twitch will never require positive sentiment from an influencer, and it will never suppress negative impressions.
• If a sponsored video is on the front page, it will say “sponsored channel.”
• Tweets and newsletters that feature or promote sponsored content will feature “brought to you by” language.

These rules apply only to campaigns that go through Twitch. Broadcasters are still free to make their own deals and probably will continue to do so.

It isn’t going to change too much in the question of whether it’s a conflict of interest for a content creator or streamer to take money to promote a game, but at least it’s a start.

Twitch blog “Transparency in Sponsored Content and Promotion”: [x]