The Amouranth situation shows that Twitch needs to be clearer about their rules

Twitch has given a whole generation of people a new way to make money. It’s helped create superstars, including some millionaires. The one thing that’s also been quite strange, though, is how they enforce their rules.

There’s been a number of high-profile bust-ups with Twitch, like with Dr. Disrespect who was unceremoniously removed from Twitch in June of 2020. The official word at the time was that he’d violated the community guidelines. He’s still never returned to the platform but has just moved over to YouTube instead.

The latest drama seems to involve Kaitlyn Siragusa, who’s better known as Amouranth. She’s become an extremely popular streamer thanks to the ‘hot tub meta’ and regularly streams to tens of thousands of people while hanging out in an inflatable pool and chatting with her users.

According to her, she received no warning before all advertising was pulled from her channel.

This is a little different from people getting banned from Twitch for accidental or planned nudity, racist speech, or other bad behaviour. Sudden removal of an income stream, without any warning, is an alarming signal from the leading streaming platform.

That’s what I find to be a worrying sign. As a platform that has certain community guidelines, it’s more than acceptable for Twitch to enact bans. But as a platform designed to make people money (and also profit from these users’ work), it’s strange that someone like Amouranth, who has 2.8 million followers, to suddenly get advertising revenue removed.

I’m not saying I approve of her content, because I think hot tub streams are pretty stupid, but I don’t like the fact that someone who helps you earn money can suddenly be cut from a portion of their income stream with no warning.

She’s become big enough that losing advertising revenue wouldn’t be a killer to her earnings, but not everyone’s that lucky or that popular. I’d prefer if Twitch had clear rules on what could get your advertising pulled – so that people couldn’t just wake up one day to see something like this. 

Twitch is built on the efforts of all its streamers, so they at least deserve some real guidelines on how they can ensure that they don’t end up in Amouranth’s situation.

What do you think? Should streamers be given a clearer understanding of what it takes to get an ad suspension? Share your thoughts in the comments below!