Twitch is the largest social live-streaming platform in the Global North, and has historically been an important advertising and community hub for the gaming industry (Johnson & Woodcock, 2018). Twitch’s owner, Amazon, demands increasing growth and profit (Yin-Poole, 2024), so the platform must continue attracting new streamers, viewers, and advertisers. However, these new audiences may be at odds with Twitch’s core base of white, Asian, cisgender men (see Cote, 2020). This means many of Twitch’s policies and attempts at platform governance are often implemented inconsistently or in an ad-hoc manner, leading to greater confusion about what is and isn’t permissible on the platform (Winslow, 2024). Platform governance, also known as content moderation, harkens to how “platforms don’t make content, but they will make important choices about that content; what they will distribute and to whom, how they will connect users and broker their reactions, and what they will refuse” (Gillespie, 2018, pp. 254-255). As Twitch struggles to grow its audience but remains faithful to its core base, questions emerge as to who may be experiencing unfair moderation practices.

How does inconsistency become an institution? Here, we examine platform governance and moderation on Amazon’s Twitch.tv as a cultural practice. Through case studies and thematic analysis, we showcase moments of regulatory inconsistency that are constitutive of how Twitch manages harm. Our analysis identifies contexts, temporalities, and violence as critical themes for identifying Twitch’s inconsistent moderation. We offer a playbook for better understanding live streaming platform governance as an iterative process which frequently targets vulnerable streamers.

We applied thematic analysis to two case studies to document how regulatory inconsistencies are directed at historically marginalized streamers. These cases include Twitch’s response to: 1) Kai Cenat’s impromptu community meet-up which was labeled a riot by the NYPD and 2) When Twitch modified their clothing and attire policy three times in one month to curtail the so-called ‘topless meta’, where a handful of women staged their cleavage to imply full nudity and optimize viewer engagement.

In order to sustain a bustling livestreaming ecosystem, platforms have implemented monetization strategies such as monthly subscriptions and virtual gifts. Existing literature has examined how creators and platforms jointly navigate monetization for economic stability (Caplan & Gillespie, 2020; Kopf, 2020; Rieder et al., 2023), and how creator labor is driven by precarity and neoliberal promises of entrepreneurial success (Panneton, 2023; Duffy et al., 2021). Yet despite increasing interest in the creator-platform relationship, there remains a dearth of scholarship surrounding platform users. Thus, by analyzing the purchase behavior of livestream viewers, this paper answers the following: 1) how has the livestreaming industry and its audience mutually reinforced an attention economy predicated on financial capital? 2) How has platform monetization reshaped intimacy and visibility? And 3) what are the consequences of these structures on digital participation and class stratification?

Utilizing YouTube and Twitch as sites of analysis, this study employs semiotic interface analysis (Brock, 2018) and non-participant observation. Results show that viewers are rewarded for purchases by being visually marked in the chat window, increasing the likelihood of being seen by livestreamers. I argue that platform monetization—by enabling visibility, social capital, and perceived intimacy—privileges viewers with greater economic capital and promotes class stratification. Rather than being forcibly imposed, however, the system is mutually supported by platforms and viewers because it fulfills their desires for profit and recognition, respectively. This study hence challenges us to grapple with the long-term consequences of reinforcing transactional relationships, and dissects access and identity within highly commodified platforms.

Webcam sex platforms have grown into a multi-billion industry over the past few decades and host large populations of performers. Success on these platforms is often framed in terms of appearing higher in the algorithmically ranked performance list on their homepage. However, among webcam performers, focusing on a smaller, niche audience is a recognized strategy. This suggests that financial success on these platforms takes a variety of forms and manifests beyond merely ‘ranking higher’.

To better understand the different ways the platform affords financial success for its performers, we collected public ranking, viewership and tip data from Chaturbate, one of the largest camming platforms, over a two-week period in July 2022. We use an array of analysis techniques and arrive at three preliminary findings. Firstly, we find a pronounced winners-take-all distribution of tips on Chaturbate, strongly correlating with viewership and homepage ranking. Secondly, we identify low-ranking performers with substantial earnings, suggesting viable paths to sustainable income beyond seeking front-page visibility. Thirdly, we uncover niche-visibility areas linked to specific labels and tags, where performers often rely on small numbers of generous tippers, or 'whales'.

Our findings reinforce previous academic observations concerning the competitive environment in webcam sex as well as creator industries at large. Yet, we also discern alternative income-generation strategies beyond high homepage ranking. However, the strong reliance on whale tippers within more niche areas of content underscores the precarity in the industry, and the fact that performers ultimately remain dependent on a combination of platform affordances and viewer attention.