It's my birthday week, but instead of birthday wishes, I'd love it if you would support the Sick Kids Foundation with a donation via Tiltify! As a newborn, Sick Kids Hospital performed surgery on me. I would not be here if not for them. So yeah, if you enjoy this newsletter or any other work I do, please consider supporting them! Every dollar counts! And with that, let's get into this week's news.
Twitch News
I saw Dexerto talk about Twitch losing 10% of hours watched in November - however, there's a problem they don't address (or didn't bother to research). For about 8-days in November, Twitch's API connection to third parties was broken, causing 4-9% of all streams not to be tracked. At the time, that tracked as a 25% viewership loss during that period. This issue was reported in the dev forums. When you factor in that, along with November's usual decline - you get a somewhat more reasonable 7% decline. Minutia... but the details matter.
- Shield Mode is now available, a tool that effectively acts as a panic button. You preset safety settings that activate immediately when the Shield mode is activated.
- Twitch denied a widely demanded request to remove Autism Speaks from its charity mode.
- Twitch's Privacy Policy was updated to reflect data collection, deleting accounts, Japan, and Live events updates.
- Jeff Blackburn, Amazon's SVP in charge of Twitch and other media properties - is retiring. In his place, Steve Boom (who helped with the UMG deal with Twitch) will now have Amazon authority over Twitch.
- Amazon's logo now appears on the front page of Twitch - proudly proclaiming 'an amazon company.'
- The US Army planned to work with Twitch streamers to help market and recruit people.
- A couple of employee notes: 8bitdylan (Community Marketing Manager) is leaving Twitch, while thaButtress has been promoted to Director of Global Partner Operations.
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