Politician Streams on Twitch and Breaks Records

What happens when a young American politician plays one of the currently most popular games and then streams it all online? Right, almost half a million people are watching.

All kinds of nerds, gaming enthusiasts and people who just want to watch others gamble cavort on Twitch. A relatively new group that Twitch has discovered is that of politicians. The incumbent US President Donald Trump discovered Twitch as an important tool in the election campaign in 2019 and began broadcasting events live. However, in July 2020, Trump’s account was temporarily suspended for violating Twitch’s policy on hateful content.

One of the best-known young US politicians dealt better with Twitch: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is usually only called AOC by her initials. She has been a member of the United States House of Representatives for the 14th Congressional District of New York since January 2019. Born in 1989 and currently the youngest MP, she announced on Twitter that she would stream her first video on Twitch

AOC does it better than Trump

However, AOC did not only operate election advertising, but gambled the game Among Us primarily together with people like the well-known streamer Pokimane and the activist Ilhan Omar, who also belongs to the House of Representatives. The relatively simple-looking game with the little comic astronauts is currently very popular. A popularity that AOC took advantage of and combined with its own reach and the young Twitch target group.

The result: a complete success. After the first three quarters of an hour, the stream reached 435,000 viewers on AOC’s newly set up account alone, and the number of followers on Twitch rose to over 600,000 during the three and a half hour live stream. The recording has now been viewed more than four and a half million times on her profile

New feature on Twitch

So-called mid-roll ads are a thorn in the side of streamers and they block them. Twitch is now fighting back against Ublock – and reaping even more resentment. Every ten to twenty minutes a window pops up that asks the user to “deactivate a third-party tool that slows down the performance of the site.” This is roughly what Twitch’s current campaign looks like to take action against the widespread ad blocker Ublock.

In mid-September of 2020, the Amazon subsidiary began to put advertising in the middle of the game streams. In contrast to before, the streamers did not control the fade-in and could not warn their audience about it. The result: annoyed and angry streamers. The audience was no different. The excitement is understandable: This is about live content. And that is robbed of its character when the viewer has to rewind because at the crucial moment an advertisement blocked his view. After protests didn’t help, the community is increasingly relying on ad blockers such as Ublock. In contrast, the Twitch account is now placing the new warning dialogs.

Twitch itself states that the mid-roll experiment with the ads has ended and the ad density has not been changed. The only automatic displays are pre-rolls, i.e. advertisements before the start of the broadcast. The streamers can also hide these from their subscribers.