Saturday, February 8, 2025

Colorado Plays

Playing in Colorado in all forms.

Streaming

How Hard Is It to Become a Twitch Affiliate?

To start earning ad revenue on Twitch as well as other forms of monetization, you need to become an affiliate. To become an affiliate, you need to hit certain criteria. But how hard is it to reach those numbers?

In reality, it could take you as little as a month.

The requirements for becoming a Twitch affiliate are relatively low, especially compared to a partner. But that’s a blog post for another day.

Now, you can start earning revenue the moment you go live for the first time. This is in the form of donations. However, subscriptions and other tools only unlock after hitting affiliate status.

Requirements Needed for a Twitch Affiliate

The requirements for becoming an affiliate are not overly difficult to achieve. Perhaps the hardest is getting an average of three viewers throughout the 30-day period as a new streamer.

Generally speaking, though, it’s not a grueling process if you’re going all-in to become a permanent fixture on Twitch.

Reach 50 Followers

Before you become a Twitch affiliate, you’ll need at least 50 people following your account. This may sound a bit daunting at first as some people are a bit stingy when it comes to following a new channel.

Getting enough followers to trigger the affiliate application is probably one of the more difficult to achieve. If you’re lucky and have a decent social media presence, it may not be as difficult as others. Just consider the sheer volume of competition you’re facing on Twitch.

Keep this in mind, in 2024, there were 7.35 million streamers going live every month. Although most are not your direct competition, you still have an uphill battle to get yourself noticed.

What About Follow-for-Follow?

Some communities have what’s called follow-for-follow. This is when you follow someone and they follow you back. Depending on the community you join, you could hit 50 followers extremely quickly.

However, it’s not always the best practice. Most of the people who follow you in this case will not be your audience. This means very few of them will actually watch your stream. No viewership means no revenue.

Some of these followers might stick around so you get the three views per stream average, which I’ll mention in a moment. But for the most part, don’t bank on them even looking at your channel.

Stream for 8 Hours

The requirement for streaming for eight hours only counts how long you’re live within the 30-day window. It doesn’t matter if anyone is watching; it’s only how long you’re actually streaming on Twitch.

For instance, if you stream once per week for two hours, you’ll hit the eight-hour mark on week four.

The hours are cumulative throughout the month. So, you can technically stream at any point for any length of time on Twitch as long as you hit the 8-hour mark.

Theoretically, you could stream for 16 minutes every day for a month and achieve the hours and days requirement for becoming a Twitch Affiliate.

Stream on 7 Different Days

Like the hours, streaming days are cumulative for the month. As long as you go live on seven separate days, you’ll get the achievement.

The thing to keep in mind is that it has to be seven different days, not how often you go live. For example, you will only get credit for a single day if you go live one morning and then go live again after lunch on the same day.

We started the ColoradoPlays channel by streaming every Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm. So, we had the eight-hour requirement in the bag before having the follow count or the viewership achievements.

Average of 3 Viewers

Another of the most difficult things to achieve for affiliate status is getting an average of three viewers per stream. Twitch will keep track of this for you in the Analytics Overview screen.

Viewers per Stream

What makes this incredibly difficult is that Twitch is a social platform. Meaning that most people who watch streamers are doing so for interpersonal connections and interactions. If there are no viewers, a lot of people will move on to another stream.

One of the ways we achieved having an average of three viewers per stream was by having the live feed embedded into our blog. Back in the day, viewers and time were recorded from this website, so when someone visited because of an article, they could watch the feed and it counted toward affiliate status.

I’m not sure if it still works this way at the moment, as Amazon could have put the kibosh on how data is collected from external sources. The moment I can verify it still works, I’ll update the post. But it worked brilliantly for us in the past.

In any case, getting enough viewers is probably the most difficult to achieve, in my opinion. At least, not without spending a lot of time building up your community.

How to Find the Twitch Affiliate Achievement

If you want to know where your Twitch channel stands, you can find it in your dashboard.

Go to the Analytics tab on the left and click the arrow to expand the tool list.

Expand Analytics in Twitch

Click on the “Achievements” option from the list.

Your Achievements

In the Achievements screen, you’ll see a list of four that you are working toward. You’ll also see a section of “In Progress” at the bottom. These are simply achievements that can motivate you to keep streaming. They really have no direct bearing on building your channel. It’s the top four to which you’re paying attention.

If you click on any of the top 4 achievements, it will expand to show you where you’re at in terms of reaching that specific level. In this case, you would click the “Path to Affiliate” header.

Expand Twitch Affiliate Level

From here, you will see how much further you have to go to become an affiliate of Twitch. Once you meet the requirements, you can set up your affiliate settings and whatnot. This will include things like your payment method, the Twitch Affiliate Agreement, and tax interviews.

Path to Affiliate Requirements

Can You Lose Twitch Affiliate Status By Not Streaming?

The only way you can lose affiliate status on Twitch is if you break the Terms of Service. And even then, it depends on severity as you could simply be put on a short-lived ban.

I’ve seen bans last from 24 hours to a month for a variety of breaches.

However, you won’t lose affiliate status if you can’t maintain the numbers for a 30-day period. Once you reach the requirements at any point in your streaming career and fill out the agreement information, you’re good to go.

This means you can give up streaming for three years and come back as an affiliate as long as you don’t delete your channel.

9 Tips for Becoming an Affiliate on Twitch

It takes a bit more than loading up your favorite game or chatting about a topic you enjoy to quickly build an audience. If you want to succeed on Twitch, you need to figure out something that makes you unique in your style.

Here are a few things that may help you along the way.

1. Create and Maintain a Steaming Schedule

Perhaps one of the most important aspects of becoming a Twitch affiliate is consistency. Creating and sticking to a stream schedule helps create a solid base as people who enjoy your streams know when you go live.

Not to mention the fact that viewers will lose interest in watching you if you’re not online on a regular basis. A lack of consistent streaming is why a lot of people will unfollow your account.

Keep in mind that you need to stream for at least seven days and for at least eight hours in a 30-day period. If you don’t have a lot of time, start with a minimum of two days a week for an hour or two each. That way, you’ll hit the day and time requirements for affiliate status.

2. Bring Your Personality to the Stream

While being good at a game can draw viewers, it’s your personality that will keep them coming back. Of course, the type of personality you deliver should be relevant to the viewers you’re trying to attract.

If you sound like Eyore on downers, you’re probably not going to keep a lot of viewers during your streams.

Have fun, bring some energy, and give them a reason to follow. You don’t need to load yourself up on caffeine and bounce off the walls. But people want to hang out with those who are having fun, which often means bringing a certain level of energy to the content.

3. Be Interactive with Viewers

Whether you’re streaming on Twitch or YouTube, interaction is key to keeping people around for the long haul. These platforms center around social engagement. So, you have to be social if you want them to come back next time.

When you get larger, it’ll be quite difficult to keep up with chat as the screen can fly by so fast. But until then, interact with your viewers and make them part of the show. They appreciate the call-out and can quickly become fans.

The bottom line is that interaction is one of the key elements to succeeding on any video platform.

4. Flesh Out Your Channel’s Page

Make sure to spend time fleshing out the panels on your channel’s page. There’s a lot you can do on the channel page to engage your viewers. This can include everything from adding a donation link to installing an extension for the game you play.

For example, there’s an extension that shows viewers what your armor layout is like while playing Path of Exile.

Customize your channel’s page and make it a part of your brand. There’s a lot you can do and there are plenty of online resources in case you need images and backgrounds. For instance, you can easily make a Twitch banner for free using Canva.

5. Play Newer Games

A lot of experts say you should play the latest and greatest games. I don’t think that it’s necessary, but a lot of people swear up and down how it works for them.

Keep in mind, though, that everyone’s experiences will be unique. Not everyone is going to have the same experience on Twitch as a streamer, mostly because of their personality.

Or, maybe you want to be known as a retro gamer.

At the end of the day, though, you can’t argue with how popular newer games can be on the platform. It may help you draw a bit of an audience as there are so many people watching. But it also means you’re going to have far more competition.

6. Embed the Stream Into Your Blog

As I mentioned earlier, we accumulated a lot of our watch time directly from the blog. Some days, the viewership of the blog was greater than that of Twitch itself.

I’m not sure if it still works like that today as Twitch has made a lot of changes since I became an affiliate. However, sharing the stream on your blog can at least pique someone’s interest to follow your account.

Embedding works better if you’re using WordPress or have access to the backend of your blogging system to add code snippets.

7. Share on Social Media

Having a social media following is essential nowadays. Even as an author, a lot of publishing houses won’t even look at you unless you have thousands of followers.

Learning how to use hashtags effectively and engaging with people on social media can help spread the word about your Twitch channel. This is a part of marketing that often works exceptionally well for streamers.

I use systems like Buffer to automatically post to several social sites at once. And the free version can easily get you started on building a viewer-base.

8. Focus on the Viewer’s Experience

Remember, there are thousands upon thousands of other streams people can watch. Why would they want to sit and watch you?

Success depends on how you deliver a great viewer experience. What this entails depends on the type of people you want watching your channel. So, you might have to test the waters a bit to see what works best.

No matter how you slice it, though, success depends on how well you connect with those individuals. This could include certain background music, visual overlays that are eye-catching, or any other element that makes the experience fun for the viewer.

9. Be Patient

It’s vital that you remain patient with yourself and your channel. It can take quite a long time to grow a channel to the point of pulling in a decent amount of money.

Some people will rake in the dough almost immediately through donations and such. But it may take months or even years to generate enough from ad revenue and bits to get a payout from Twitch.

I personally know someone who quit his full-time job to be a Twitch streamer and ultimately failed at replacing the income. Needless to say, he had to get a regular job to pay his bills after about nine months or so of streaming.

Keep an eye on your analytics and watch for consistent growth. As long as your viewership keeps growing, you’re on the right path. Dive into the data and see if you can find where you can improve.

Don’t expect instant success, though. It’s exceptionally rare that anyone falls ass-backward into making a ton of money from Twitch in the first month. Well, unless you’re a cute hot tub streamer. In which case, I just lost all respect for you.

Becoming a Twitch Affiliate Is Only the Beginning

It’s not overly difficult to become an affiliate. The hard part is consistently delivering content that your viewers want from you. Affiliate status is only the beginning if you’re looking to make a career out of streaming.

Thousands will go live right now, and most will fail in the first few months. Most of that is because a lot of folks are impatient and won’t give their channel enough time to grow.

Streaming is fun, and if you’re enjoying the experience, so will your viewers. Give them what they want and they’ll keep coming back.

Michael Brockbank
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Michael Brockbank

Michael developed ColoradoPlays to help various charities through his favorite pastime. Since then, the blog and Twitch channels have donated several hundred dollars to Extra Life, Geeks of Grandeur and Operation Supply Drop, to name a few.