Twitch wants users to put their money where their mouths are with ‘Cheering’

By Will Fulton June 27, 2016

Twitch is introducing a new feature, Cheering, that provide viewers with a new tool they can use to express their appreciation for their favorite broadcasters on the dominant streaming platform for gamers. Cheers are special chat messages, highlighted with attention-grabbing, animated emotes. They scale up in size and complexity depending on how many Bits — a new, platform-specific currency that users can purchase through Twitch — are spent.

To Cheer, users simply type “cheer” followed by the number of Bits they wish to spend (e.g. cheer10, cheer100, etc). The more bits spent, the louder the Cheer will be. Fans that cheer a lot will earn special badges. Bits can be purchased in bulk for $1.40 per 100 Bits by clicking on the Bits icon at the bottom of the chat window of participating channels.

“Our community loves to support their favorite broadcasters, and Cheering using Bits provides a fun new way to level up their appreciation,” said Twitch CEO Emmett Shear in a press release. “If channel subscriptions are the equivalent to holding season tickets for your favorite sports team, Cheering is like getting a crowd wave started during the game.”

Cheering is currently in beta, available for only select channels, including Bacon_donut, brotatoe, cobaltsteak, cohhcarnage, dansgaming, and dozens more. Third-party integrations from Muxy, TwitchAlerts, Design by Teak, and others will allow partner broadcasters to add channel-specific features such as custom on-screen acknowledgements for supporters’ Cheers. You can read a full list of participating channels on the Twitch blog.

Representatives from Twitch suggested that broadcasters would receive a majority share of the revenue from spent BitsDominant streaming platform, but have not yet confirmed this to be the case, or elaborated on what the distribution would be. We will update this story with further details as they are available.

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Will Fulton is a New York-based writer and theater-maker. In 2011 he co-founded mythic theater company AntiMatter Collective…

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