The prominent livestreaming services platform StreamElements is preparing to close its website and sunset its creator tools.
Founded in 2016, StreamElements has become ubiquitous within the livestreaming space for its free creator tools including bots, overlays and a brand partnership marketplace. Over 23 million creators have used StreamElements over the past decade, according to numbers shared by the company in January.
Update: StreamElements tweeted the following message at 1:20 a.m. PST Friday, May 14:
Official Update: We’re in positive discussions with potential acquirers and working to find the best path forward for creators, customers, and our team. We’ll share more updates soon. We’ve spent over a decade building for creators and will do everything we can to keep supporting this community.
Another update: At 7:53 a.m. PST on Thursday, May 21, StreamElements tweeted an official message that it would no longer be shutting down after having promising conversations with potential acquisition partners following the initial announcement that the company was preparing to close its doors, attributing the message to StreamElements co-founder Or Perry:
Official update for our community : We are not shutting down!
StreamElements is in conversation with an amazing partner aligned around one thing: working in the interest of creators and the community.
Your tools and data are safe.
We’ve secured funding while partner integration is underway, and pending creator payments will roll out over the coming weeks.
More information soon, I’m sure you’ll like it.
A StreamElements staff member initially informed creators about the company’s potential closure in a post published in offshoot Discord server used by the staffer to run StreamElements sponsorships, which GamesBeat has viewed. In the post, the StreamElements employee said that the company was preparing to “close its doors,” with StreamElements’ website scheduled to remain open for 30 days. The staff member encouraged creators using StreamElements products to log in during this window to save any assets, and ensured creators that they would be fully paid out for any current sponsorship deals negotiated through StreamElements’ platform.
“Thank you for all the incredible content and for being part of this community,” the StreamElements employee wrote in the Discord post. “If you have immediate questions regarding your active campaigns, please reach out as soon as possible.”
StreamElements raised over $111 million to grow and monetize its suite of creator tools, including a $100 million funding round in 2021. But although StreamElements’ products are in widespread use, the company never announced profitability. The company’s brand partnership marketplace did not scale as much as needed to justify the company’s investment, and as advertising dollars flowed from Twitch into more diversified forms of gaming inventory in recent years, StreamElements suffered.
After reaching a peak of over 200 employees in early 2022, StreamElements has undergone a series of layoffs in recent years. It’s unclear how many employees remained at the company before its announced closure, but StreamElements’ LinkedIn page listed 72 employees as of May 14.
In January, StreamElements launched a “Keep It Live” crowdfunding campaign, asking creators who had used the company’s products over the past decade to chip in and help StreamElements keep the lights on. In a video posted to X shortly after the announcement, StreamElements co-founder Or Perry said that brand partnerships were StreamElements’ primary revenue stream, stressing the platform’s ongoing mission to provide its tools and services to creators free-of-charge.
“We have our own marketplace to match between content creators and brands, and we only get paid when creators get paid for sponsored content,” Perry said in the video.
For creators who have relied on StreamElements’ tools for years, news of the platform’s impending shutdown came as a shock. Creators who want to customize their overlays and alerts or automate their chat moderation will have to move to a rival service, with some creators taking to social media to voice their concerns over the decreasing number of free tools providing these functions.
“The hardest part about StreamElements shutting down is going to be finding an alternative,” said Twitch streamer GappyV in an interview with GamesBeat.
Correction: This story originally attributed StreamElements’ closure announcement to a post in the company’s official Discord server. The post was actually published in an offshoot Discord server operated by a StreamElements staff member, per Twitch streaming community insider Zach Bussey.