Twitch has suspended its paid channel promotion feature because users were displaying porn on the service’s home page.
The innovation began to be tested back in October 2021 – it allows viewers of streamers to pay for the promotion of the author so that his channel appears on the Twitch main page, opening up access to new subscribers.
Previously, there was a free analogue of such a function on the platform, but then it was enough for viewers to watch and subscribe to the channels they were interested in. In this case, they could pay money for promotion – this, by the way, was available to the streamers themselves.
The testing period ended at the end of 2021, but this March, the service launched a similar feature ( Boost Train ) again. Now viewers could buy subscriptions, achieving similar results with promotion.
Complaints about all these systems have already appeared in the past, since those whose channels were already popular and whose audience was solvent were more likely to get to the main page. But this time the situation was even more problematic.
On March 30, Twitter and Reddit users noticed that porn was being streamed on the main Twitch page, and we are talking about several channels at once.
As a result, a representative of the platform said that their experiment with the new feature has been paused for the time being. Whether the authors are going to somehow adapt it in the future is unclear. It is possible that similar systems simply will not be available to viewers in the near future.
