So you just got invited to be a Twitch Affiliate? Congrats!! Here’s some handy information that you might want to browse through. No rush, so just bookmark this page and come back to it when you’re ready.

The money

Yes, it’s great to think “hey now I can get paid to play games / create art / etc”, but don’t get too excited for this side of things. Subscription money is shared with Twitch, there are tax withholdings, you won’t get paid till you hit 100 USD, and even then there’s a month or two of delay. So just keep on doing what you’re passionate about, keep on engaging with your community, and when your first payout arrives, it’ll be a cool bonus.

Same goes for viewership numbers, follower counts, and all those other juicy stats. Don’t stress about them. Maybe you won’t have three average viewers. Maybe you will. Maybe someone will raid you, and you’ll have heaps of people! That’s great! But maybe not, too, and that’s okay. Make your streams the best they can be, and don’t worry about whether the numbers are going up or down.

Okay, that’s the negativity out of the way. On to the more fun stuff!!

Emotes

Exciting, but perhaps daunting in their massive flexibility. You have emote slots waiting to be filled with iconographic representations of you and your community. Unless you are yourself an emote artist, spend some time looking at the portfolios of a few artists available for commission.

• Maaya
• TODO: Find more artists who do emote commissions and are still active!
• And any other emote artists you know of

In general, simple shapes communicate better than scaled-down photographs do. You can’t see much detail at 56x56 pixels or below (which is how emotes are usually seen in Twitch chat), so the bolder and simpler the lines, the more likely that the emote will say what it’s trying to say.

(If you’re a highly competent artist (or tightly strapped for cash), you can always create your own emotes, but it’s often still worth browsing portfolios, just for the sake of seeing what people do.)

There are several different types of emote slots. What should they be used for?

• Tier 1 subscriber emotes are your most iconic. Everyone who subscribes to your channel gets these emotes. What makes your channel different from every other one? What is something that you focus on? Think about how your emote will be used in OTHER people’s channels.
• Tier 2 and Tier 3 subscriber emotes are for people who wish to support you even more! It’s great to be able to reward them with something special. But even if nobody does, these are still your own personal emotes. Use them for something fancy, unusual, or perhaps just weird!
• When people cheer in your channel, they can permanently unlock emotes. If you have slots for these emotes, again, you’ll have those emotes yourself. At first you will have three slots available; once someone cheers enough to unlock those three, you will get a fourth slot, and so on.
• Follower emotes can be used for free in your own channel. Your subscribers (at any tier) can also use them in other channels. So they’re like additional T1 emotes, but also freely available in your own chat.
• Animated emote slots accompany all of the subscriber tiers, allowing fancy flashy emotes. Don’t have any ideas for neat animations? Use Twitch’s “Easy Animate” feature to turn a static emote into an animated one!

Instant uploading of new emotes may be available to you, but even if they require approval, it usually doesn’t take very long. So don’t stress out over this, and have all the fun :)

As your channel grows, you have the opportunity to unlock more Tier 1 emotes, and emotes for the higher bit badges too. So if you have more ideas for emotes than you have slots for, write down the other ideas, as you might be able to use them later!

Alerts

Since you’ve already reached the point of affiliation, you most likely have on-stream alerts for new followers, raids, etc, perhaps via StreamLabs or some similar service. Now you have more events to look at alerts for - cheers, subs, resubs, gift subs, etc. As with emotes, these can strongly contribute to your channel’s theme. Most likely, this won’t be at all surprising to you.

Panels

Again, you almost certainly have some useful panels below your stream. Time to add a few more! Showcase your emotes, perhaps. Do you have your schedule there (or, even better, a link to a Google calendar)? Talk about the benefits your subscribers get or what you do for your subscribers. Commemorate your strongest supporters. Doesn’t have to be much, but this is a good time to browse your current panels and see what you can add.

Channel bot

If you don’t have one, now’s a good time to get one. There are a variety of bots available - famous ones like Nightbot, StreamLabs, StreamElements, and many others. More info about bots here.

Once you have emotes, you can create bot commands that make use of them!

Moderators and VIPs

Unlocking VIP badges for the channel requires having five chatters at once, so you may or may not have this feature. But when you do, you’ll be able to reward the people who’ve loyally supported your stream. Find yourself one or more good mods and then give VIP badges to some other amazing people. Again, this isn’t specifically related to affiliation, but as your channel grows, you have a perfect opportunity to think about this again.

What else?

Keep your channel going strong by doing the same things that got you to this point: loving what you do, streaming consistently, having something that people want to watch, networking with other streamers. None of that changes, but now you can use affiliate perks (mainly emotes) to strengthen what you do.

So keep on having all the fun! Stream on. Keep on being awesome.