Channel Points

The Channel Points system is a way for viewers to earn points by watching their favorite streamer and redeem cool rewards. This system allows streamers to engage with their audience in new and exciting ways and rewards viewers for simply watching a stream. Channel Points was a success not only in viewer retention, but also helped increase hours watched on the Twitch platform.

Art Direction • Branding • UI/UX • 

Channel Points initial launch video showing how Twitch viewers can earn and spend their points.


The purpose of the Channel Points system was to create a first party viewer engagement and retention system for our streamers and viewers. This system would live in web and mobile platforms and would act as a “grinding” mechanism for viewers to engage with the Twitch Platform, as well as a community building product for streamers.


Some key wins from launching our feature and a video of streamers’ reaction to the initial release. Channel Points has proven to be a successful product for our streamers and viewers. Streamers were given tools to help build and engage with their community as well as strengthen their brand. Viewers were rewarded for watching a stream, engaging with Twitch, and given perks usually only rewarded to paying users.

Passive Earning

Viewers earn points simply by watching their favorite streamer. Every 5 minutes you watch you are given 10 points.  Here's an example of our animation that appears showing the viewer they have earned points.

Channel Points

Bonus Earning

Every 15 minutes viewers are given Bonus Points which are redeemed by clicking or tapping our prompt, incentivizing them to stay longer in a streamer's page. Other ways to earn points are achieved by participating in other features on the Twitch site such as following, joining a raid, gifting a subscription, "cheering" and even returning with consecutive watch streaks.


Viewers are rewarded with multipliers by subscribing to their favorite streamer. The higher the subscription, the larger the multiplier.

Automatic Rewards

When a streamer becomes partner or affiliate we give you a starter set of Default/Automatic Rewards. These rewards are fulfilled by Twitch and effect chat and the streamer’s emotes. These automatic rewards offer viewers an incentive to participate in the community and give them a taste of benefits if they were to become a paid customer. 

Emote Rewards

Some automatic rewards let you unlock or modify emotes from Twitch streamers for 24 hours. This allows non-paying viewers an idea what it’d be like to own and use that particular streamer’s emotes for a day.

Example of our Unlock a Random Sub Emote reward that features a delightful animation before unlocking an emote for you.

Viewers could modify a streamer’s emotes with their points and then use that emote in chat. We used facial recognition software to better place various modifiers on the faces of emotes.

Channel Points

Text based Rewards

Some rewards allow your text to stand out in chat or bypass pay-walled chats. These rewards encouraged participation in chat as served to give users recognition in their communities.

Channel Points

Streamer Tools & Customization

In our UX research streamers stressed the desire for more customized branding of their channels and features with a loyalty system. With this in mind, our team created a set of tools so streamers could brand and customize their Channel Points icon, name, and their rewards.

Channel Points

Streamers can access Channel Points under Viewer Rewards in their creator dashboard to modify the Channel Points feature to their liking. Streamers upload their own Channel Points icon and can rename to what they want.

Channel Points

A snapshot of our Manage reward area where streamers can manage all their rewards and customize them as they please. This layout proved effective in managing rewards by giving streamers full control over what would be shown in their channels.

Channel Points

Streamers fill out all the details of their rewards and can even customize the Automatic/Default rewards we give them. A preview of how your rewards would be displayed was shown in real time.

Channel Points

Custom Rewards Collection

We continue to monitor our users’ feedback as we develop the Channel Points system, and we integrate more features to ensure streamers to reduce streamer burden. One such example is this Custom Rewards Collection, which addressed a streamer need of a quicker way to add custom rewards to their channel as well help them ideate on what their channel could offer.

Channel Points

With 98%+ streamer adoption rate of the Channel Points system, the product has been a huge success. This image highlights some of the many custom rewards and points images that users have created since Channel Points’ inception.