Streamer Beware

As a content creator you are constantly having to look out for scams and people wanting to get you to advertise their products for free. Many content creators and live streamers have a mind set for when they get to a certain level they'll be able to get sponsorships from everywhere and be rolling in the money. Unfortunately that doesn't happen and is a trap as old as time itself.

The culture on Twitch is one that viewers are more inclined to subscribe, send tips, and general easier to support you one way another while on the service. One of the ways is from on stream advertising of a game, service, or product that typically might fit some of your viewers but tend to not cover yours or even those of your audience. These so called "sponsorships" requires you to advertise the item on your stream, requiring a placement within your channel page panels or even to dedicate hours of your stream time to that item per week. We've all seen the typical Raid Shadow Legends, Hello Fresh, Marvel Snap, Manscape, and countless others that it seems like that the only companies doing these sponsorships, we kind of overlook them being placed into our favorite streamers content.

Of course some creators are getting the compensation but, there are many more that are being taken advantage of from these predatory sponsorships.

Many, if not all of the sponsorships that are offered lately via Streamelements sponsorship program are of this type in which you are offered a deal to advertise an item or product that are more general interest and not focused to your content or even your audience demographics. I get these all of the time and I've never wanted to start them up as my own audience is very important to me and to subject them to products or services that I, myself haven't used or have had a positive experience with. My content is worth more than what many of these offers are bringing.

The above example is just one in which the company is wanting me to dedicate prime space within my channel page for five days. Along with at minimum of two hours of stream time to their product for up to a potential amount that is extremely low. With the posted experiences from others that have gone through all of the requirements and have been through the ringer in trying to get the money owed to them, the amount of work is not worth the hassle.

A sponsorship is one in which a company will pay a content creator to promote their product to their audience in which the returns are much higher as the audience are more than likely to purchase said product. Thats typically how this works. What these programs are offering are nothing more than predatory affiliate marketing that more than likely will result in free advertising with very little repercussions from the content creator and/or audience.

The money might seem easy but in the long term, you are generally hurting your own content. It's better to wait and ignore these offers and to reach out to the companies you want to work with that will benefit you and your growing community.