StreamElements' “Sponsorships” Are Deceiving and Dishonest
They are not even sponsorships
As a streamer and content creator I have to use many online tools.
One of them is StreamElements which allows creators to connect their YouTube and Twitch accounts and create overlays, stream alerts, goal bars, bot commands, and a tipping page with a leaderboard.
A pretty good tool overall.
However, it has one thing that I seriously dislike due to how deceiving it is.
I’m talking about its “sponsorships”.
You see, StreamElements has a page where brands interested in sponsoring you can offer you a campaign where you can make some money promoting their offers.
I’m not big enough for brands to be interested in me at the moment, so this is how my page looks.😢
Who does have this page active is the YouTube channel Stream Scheme which made a video showing how these “sponsorships” work and the deceptive language it uses.
After seeing it, I have to admit that StreamElements looks dishonest at best.
I’ll put the video here:
I recommend you give it a watch since it clearly shows how some creators are been taken advantage of by these shady “sponsorships”.
The issue
The way normal sponsorships work (as far as I understand) is that the creator and the company come to an agreement in which the creator gets paid to promote a product from the company.
You get paid regardless of how many sales you drive to the company and for as long as you actually put effort in the promotion, everything is fine.
However, the video shows that the “sponsorships” of StreamElements make promises of making over 10k dollars, for as long as YOUR VIEWERS complete a series of goals with said product.
Most of these “sponsorships” are from mobile games so they ask your viewers to do things like completing the tutorial or defeating a boss.
This brings up 2 problems.
- These aren’t sponsorships, they are performance-based campaigns that depend entirely on whether or not your viewers want to support you enough to download and play a mobile game.
- Most viewers won’t reach said goals because they are either hard, time-consuming, or they just don’t want to download the game. This will limit the amount of money you’ll make by a lot.
Not only that, but in some cases, these goals will require the creator and viewer to spend money, which is outrageous.
Now you might be thinking:
If these “sponsorships” are that bad, then just don’t do them.
And you would be correct, however, these “sponsorships” are often sent to new streamers and creators who don’t know any better and are suddenly being offered life-changing amounts of money.
These new creators will jump at the opportunity only to later realize that the goals were pretty much impossible for them to reach.
Some creators even mention having issues where the mobile game companies didn’t pay them over some technical issues.
It’s predatory.
Yet, even though StreamElements have been called out for years now they haven’t done anything to improve it. At the very least they could change from “sponsorships” to performance campaigns to inform their users about what they are getting into.
Final Thoughts
StreamElements is one of the most beloved brands for new and experienced creators to get started due to it offering free tools to build overlays and streaming assets.
They are a great platform in THAT regard.
However, the fact is that they are being dishonest with these “sponsorships” by not properly informing the streamers about what they are getting into is too evident to not call it out.
I don’t use them too much since I found better alternatives for most of their features, but I can’t completely leave due to some of their integrations with other tools that I need.
Either way, I’m glad I never got any of those “sponsorships” because that would have gotten my hopes up only to disappoint me.
That’s all for today.
