Recently I talked to Naomi (Twitter) about the Twitch Bounty Board. I originally reached out because I’d noticed that she completed a lot more bounties than I’d seen anyone else do. Before we jump in to the interview you should review our recent article on what the Bounty Board is. Enjoy this Bounty Board interview!
What’s worked well with bounties?
Naomi’s major kudos for the Bounty Board is how easy it is to use.
“You can start the bounty at any part during the stream. Just change the title, add #ad or ‘sponsored’ and it’s automatically counted. You can wait for the perfect time and it promotes collaboration with other broadcaster.”
Basically, it’s flexible and somewhat automated. Additionally, the deals that match your stream are offered to you and you can accept them from your dash. You don’t have to chase them down on your own.
I’d also like to re-stress how much Naomi emphasized the benefits of collaborations. She’ll coordinate with other broadcasters to support each other when they’re doing Bounty Board content and that’s helped her a ton.
Finally, one of Naomi’s biggest points is that it offers a way for viewers to support you financially without spending their own money. This is especially true for free games where your community can join you in playing.
What’s been difficult?
It can be hard to hit the viewcount milestones for the offered deals. Naomi mentioned that if your average viewership is 250 your offers might have a viewership requirement of 280 with a downscale for lower view counts.
That can be pretty stressful since it feels like something you can’t always control. Yes, it can drive you to reach out for more collaboration but it also gets you away from the ease of use.
She mentioned that it can also be hard to get your keys in a reasonable time. Theoretically, you should be able to get a key for a bounty within 72 hours but sometimes Naomi has to email her contacts at Twitch to actually get the key in time to stream. That negates some of the flexibility she so loves because a bounty might be good for 5 days but you only get the key on day 4. That means that if you have a lot of viewers on day 3 you’re out of luck.
Are there any changes that you’d propose?
Yes! Here’s what she mentioned.
- Get keys immediately! This is perhaps the biggest.
- She would like to see full transparency on when you might move up or down bounty tiers. Essentially, what are the milestones for getting better offers or perhaps losing the offers you currently get. “I wish we had something like the Path to Partner milestones Affiliates have”.
- Naomi would love to be able to accept up to three bounties at a time instead of the current one. That would make it a lot easier to take advantage of when you have good viewership numbers or just fill them in when you’re feeling on fire.
- She would love to be able to exclude bounty classes that are irrelevant to her. For instance, right now she doesn’t have the technical setup for mobile or VR streams. She would love to not see those offers and instead get more relevant ones.
Is it worth it?
For the most part, yes.
One of her biggest points is that doing an hour of bounty a day wouldn’t dramatically impact her content but could help give her a financial baseline that in conjunction with her other revenue streams could be a full-time living. That way she could focus the rest of her time on making a great stream and not worrying as much about money.
It’s even more worth it now that the beta allows you to use your best hour of content, numbers-wise, instead of only one hour. That way you have time to rally your community to make sure you’re hitting the top level incentives which is good for you and the company putting out the bounty.
Do you think it will continue to be a part of your long-term business plan?
As long as the contracts are good, and they are flexible with other sponsorships I currently have and may acquire in the future, absolutely.
Does telling your community you’re doing a bounty help?
Yes. Naomi feels as though her community rallies around her to make sure she hits the numbers she needs. There’ll be an effort on Discord to get more people to the stream and they see it as a great way to give back.
It acts as a super hype moment and something they can share as a community achievement. After all it’s explicitly based on eyeballs so it’s something that needs everyone to come together.
Other thoughts from Naomi
These are going to be more scattered quotes than a cohesive narrative but I thought they were good for you all to see.
- “It can be really hard for small to medium sized streamers to get deals. This makes it easy, at the cost of taking a significant pay cut from what your stream might actually be worth.”
- “The pay is on the lower end of cost per view, borderline unfair, and the contracts can ask for a lot. But the sponsorships are found and taken care of for you, and there is rarely a shortage of them. It’s all a balancing act.”
- “It can be things like playing a game for an hour, watching a 30 minute gameplay demo, or watching a 5 minute trailer. The trailers are the best because the pay is the same as playing a game for an hour.”
- Her current typical offers have a max payout of $280 and the range of required viewership is 180-200.
- Your offered bounties can go up based on your metrics.
- “One of the best things is when you get a bounty for a game you already play or have played and loved in the past.”
- She usually does them 1-3 hours before the end of her stream. That’s when she has higher viewership and can end on a high note.
- “If you can get a good management company, that’s fantastic. Content creators working with bad management companies or working one-off deals pretty frequently get taken advantage of. The bounty board is great for showing you what your hard limit lowest asking price should ever be, and they are a great stepping stone to being able to reach out to companies and say “Hey, I do sponsored stream so well, let me work with you!”
Conclusion
The Twitch Bounty Board is currently in beta. Naomi, a full-time partnered streamer was kind enough to give us some insights based on her experience with it. The Bounty Board has some good and bad points. The good tend to be that it’s relatively easy to use and gets you paid without having to work a ton of extra hours. The downsides tend to be that it offers less than other sponsored content from other sources.
Overall, Naomi is a fan.
