Before the streamers knew that Twitch stimulated more ads on streams and reduced the share of creators, the platform added a new paid feature for chat users Elevated Chat. The Twitch representatives wrote in detail about this innovation on the official page.
It looks like the company is trying to find other sources of income. Now it is difficult to give a definite answer to this question.
But from the Twitch Support Twitter page, we can learn that this new feature is in beta and will be available for about four weeks starting at the end of September on a limited number of channels.
In addition to the USA in such countries as - Germany, Canada, Australia, Korea, Japan, Brazil, Mexico, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, South Africa, and Taiwan.
Similar to YouTube`s Super chat feature, Twitch viewers can now donate $5-100 to have their message pinned for a short period of time (up to 2.5 minutes) at the top or bottom of the chat window. If several users send donations at the same time, their replicas will appear in turn.
Now, the feature appeared in the chat of some streamers in test mode. Content creators will receive 70% of the cost of a paid message. Channel moderators will be able to delete, suspend and ban users who have paid for the elevated message.
Note that this feature is enabled by default for streamers, it looks like you can't turn it off. And how now to influence whether the attached chat message appears on top of the chat or below the stream?
But since Twitch calls Elevated Chat an experiment, perhaps something will change before the full implementation of this innovation. In any case, the company hopes to restore the favor of streamers and viewers who were not thrilled with the recent increase in ads...