With its new Business Manager role launched last week, Twitch is signaling that it is a platform for all creators — not just dedicated livestreamers.
Announced on February 3, Twitch’s new Business Manager role allows creators to give select individuals access to their dashboard — and thus the ability to view their earnings, analytics and other functions that were previously accessible only to the creators themselves. Business managers have direct control over creators’ sponsorship deals, with the ability to accept and decline sponsorship opportunities on creators’ behalf via Twitch’s in-platform sponsorship portal.
To learn more about the goals and strategy behind Twitch’s Business Manager role, GamesBeat spoke to Twitch chief product officer Mike Minton, who oversaw the development of the new feature, for an annotated Q&A. Here are some of the key takeaways.
The following interview has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity.
On the broadening of the livestreaming creator ecosystem
Mike Minton: “Livestreaming is definitely becoming more of a thing for established influencers with an existing audience, whether it’s on other services or not. There’s a lot of athletes, singers, different forms of notable people. It’s not just people that started in content creation — it’s people who have an audience, and are using livestreaming, and they come with support teams, et cetera. Our tools make sure that when you come to Twitch, whether you have 10 million people on Instagram or whatever it may be, that you’re able to be successful.”
GamesBeat: Twitch’s introduction of a built-in business manager function reflects the ongoing professionalization of the creator economy. As livestreaming evolves from a relatively niche creator medium to an increasingly expected part of any digital creator’s content portfolio, platforms from Patreon to Substack have started offering livestreaming functionality to their creators. Minton’s answer highlights how Twitch’s Business Manager role is intended to make it easier for established creators with pre-existing management teams to make money on the platform.
On the relationship between the Business Manager role and Twitch’s sponsorship offering
Mike Minton: “The reality is, we’re still in the pretty early days with our sponsorship offerings, and for many of our largest influencers, they’re still mostly going to be focused on their deals that span their entire audience, whether they’re on something like a TikTok, to a Twitch, to a YouTube, to an Instagram, to an X, to a whatever. The bigger, more important problem as it relates to that class of creator is analytics access, and that is the primary driver, as opposed to the sponsorship tool probably being secondary at this point.”
GamesBeat: In this answer, Minton recognizes the limitations of platform-specific sponsorship tools on Twitch or any other platform, with larger creators typically activating across multiple platforms for their sponsorship deals. Still, Business Managers’ increased access to creators’ analytics on Twitch could encourage more creators to focus their efforts on Twitch sponsorship deals by removing an element of friction from the process. On platforms without this type of functionality, creators have to manually share their metrics with managers or brand partners, often through clunky processes like sending screenshots of their analytics dashboards.
“It created a lot of overhead, because the manager had to ask the streamer to go get their last month’s analytics,” Minton said during the interview.
On Twitch’s expectations for creators’ adoption of the new role
Mike Minton: “It’s important to understand that we’re talking about a small number of very large creators that have active management teams. Millions of streamers go live on Twitch, and we’re talking of a relatively small number that are well-established and much, much larger. I would say we’ve definitely had usage, and have some thoughts about where there could be opportunities for improvement and deeper analytics, et cetera.”
GamesBeat: Minton’s answer to this question reflects the target audience of Twitch’s new Business Manager role: established creators and influencers. Although millions of creators have indeed gone live on Twitch, the culture of the platform, and much of its engagement, is driven by a handful of prominent names at the top of the pile. If Twitch can keep these livestreaming luminaries within the platform’s fold — and entice other big-name creators over — then its Business Manager role will be a success for the company.