Brand Safety Score, coming to Twitch, rates channels for advertisers
posted Saturday Mar 27, 2021 by Scott Ertz
Twitch has had some issues over the past year or so. Most notably, the brand has had trouble being open with its community of content creators about what they are working on behind the scenes. Most notably, they came under fire when they deleted videos with little to no explanation. Later, the company apologized for how poorly they handled the situation, which surrounded a large influx of DMCA requests. Now, a new feature is coming, for which there was once again no communication - Brand Safety Score.
In fact, the only reason why information about the score is available at all is that it was exposed, either purposefully or accidentally, through the platform's internal API. Twitter user tayariCS showed off the documentation, exposing the new fields that would be added to the profiles in the future. The idea appeared to be a score that was either automatically generated or manually entered (there was evidence for both theories), that shows how advertiser friendly the channel is.
Of course, there are other indicators already available, such as whether or not the channel is set top mature content. The Brand Safety Score seems to revolve around violations of the already nebulous community standards. In fact, the documentation shows the current relationship with Twitch (active, suspended, banned, etc.), reason for suspension/ban, and past issues. It also includes custom data points which might be of value to potential advertisers.
After word hit the street of this potential change to the way channels are evaluated, Twitch responded with a statement saying,
We are exploring ways to improve the experience on Twitch for viewers and creators, including efforts to better match the appropriate ads to the right communities. User privacy is critical on Twitch, and, as we refine this process, we will not pursue plans that compromise that priority. Nothing has launched yet, no personal information was shared, and we will keep our community informed of any updates along the way.
So, as of right now, Brand Safety Score is a feature that is being considered, not one that is being implemented. However, if the API endpoint is already stood up, then the likelihood is that this is coming soon er rather than later. Having a way for advertisers to determine the value proposition for their interaction with a channel is a good thing. However, any time a company that relies on user generated content starts creating policies with dark data about its users, things are about to get complicated.
