Will YouTube End By 2020? Amazon’s Social Media Weapon, ‘Twitch’ Rivals YouTube


Despite having nearly 10 million active users per day, Amazon’s Twitch is not a well-known platform. Since it is dedicated to video games, it is still a niche for many people who have no interest in this subject. However, since it became part of Amazon companies, its relevance and potential have not stopped growing.

Yesterday, Twitch announced a new feature, a Twitter clone called Pulse which resembles and incorporates a social media setting much like Facebook. But the core objective of Pulse is centered around a very specific audience. It will also ensure that the platform events do not leave the environment.

A few weeks ago, Twitch also announced its intention to sell video games through its website with the help of the content creators who could promote titles and take a part in the proceeds of sales. It did not detail the percentages, but given the audience, the platform could become a competitor for Steam in some cases.

The benefits of being part of Amazon Prime have also been extended to Twitch. That is to say if one pays the Amazon premium, they will also be accommodating the payment requirements for Twitch in the process. This serves not to see ads, to have access to certain privileges in conversations, and also to receive some small rewards every month, like avatars for popular games.

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These features are also one the most recent three additions that YouTube has incorporated. The video platform has taken over the world over the years with rapid expansion. The most recent features also encourage salient figures to broadcast content little by little in gaining relevance outside one’s niche.

Twitch is still very far from being a real competitor of YouTube mainly because it lacks its thematic fan. However, it has managed to unify two aspects which will probably not work for YouTube in the short term: the free model with advertising and the subscription model, both for content creators and users who watch videos.

Those who want to create a Twitch audience can become service partners to monetize their creations with ads, manage the videos better, and enable a subscription for loyal users. Viewers who pay a monthly fee to the streamer will receive many other benefits such as modifying the broadcast resolution and unique chat icons among other things. This relationship between audience and creator is something that YouTube, and many other services of another type, have tried to achieve for years. Recently, YouTube TV is a new attempt to get viewers to pay for watching videos.

It is clear that Amazon wants to compete with YouTube, but not in size or number of users. However, it can offer a free platform to their subscribers and, in the process, make every user who views how to play video games online much more profitable than it is for YouTube subscribers.

At the moment, Amazon has been focused on an area in which YouTube also has a lot of strength, video games. Some of the main figures of the platform include Pewdiepie who has grown to be a millionaire just by making videos of himself playing various video games. As for now, Twitch does not have any such prominent figure yet but the platform aims to play around with its live formats in order to have a broader and more specialized group of content creators. It is not surprising that a streamer is very popular within a genre, such as shooting games, or a particular title such as League of Legends. Nor do they go beyond mere entertainment and serve as a guide or tutorial for those players who, without being experts, want to learn a few tricks and improve their ability to compete against other players.

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For all this, Twitch is usually considered as a platform superior to YouTube in terms of video games. With this land conquered, Amazon has begun to diversify the content a bit, but at the moment only through specials (such as dedicated to the painter Bob Ross), but it is soon to judge what will happen in this regard yet.

Estimates suggest that Twitch will move about $1.14 billion in profits and nearly 400 million monthly users by 2020, so its massive potential currently lies latent but every day it gets more noticeable. Get to rival YouTube or decide to go your way as a great haven for video game players from around the world, it’s a paradigm of how online services work, but a rarity in that is that the platform makes profits through subscriptions.

[Featured Image by Crusher VII /Facebook]

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