How would you improve Twitch to make creators run more ads on the platform?

I am going to attempt answering this Twitch product improvement question with limited prior knowledge of Twitch, especially its creator monetization strategy. I am also going to time myself and try to wrap this up in under 45 minutes. Feedback welcome.

Product context and assumptions:

Twitch is a user generated content platform like Youtube which gained populatrity primarily through the gaming category. When I think of Twitch, I primarily think of game streamers and live streams. 

From a strategy perspective, Twitch was acquired by Amazon which means they have alot of coushin like when YT was acquired by Google and they are in it for the long run. 

In a nutshell, the success of UGC platforms is dependant on a few key factors:

1. Do consumers find it easy to access and consume the content?
2. Do creators find it easy to create, manage and monetize their videos?
3. Do advertisers get the right tools to match their ads to the right content? 

Constraints:

Our task is to improve Twitch (overall) to help creators run more ads on their platform. Usually we would break the solution up in to Engagement vs. Revenue / costs etc. While it seems that this is a straight forward revenue improvement excercise through better ads placement on creator content, there is an engagement angle in here that we need to consider. For example just increasing ad loads can drive short term incremental revenue but can annoy users who may become disengaged, add adblockers. Creators might just turn off ads on their videos if they hear from their viewers that there are too many ads. 

Another thing to consider here is that creators may end up earning quite a bit with direct relationships with brands which Twitch does not get any cut from. Twitch would like to figure out ways of how they can build tools to help both the creator and advertisers in this case. 

Customers/Personas:

Before we jump in to the use-cases and painpoints, it would be good to make sure we are not missing any key customer cohorts/personas that we might need to take in to consideration. Its important that we look at it from a creator angle, as they are the key customers we are optimising for. Lets start by listing these out. 

1. Professional streamers: Their primary job is making UGC videos and making a living off the Ads + other side revenues. These are the big creators with atleast 10k followers or more. These could be across any categories i.e. Gaming, Sketches, Vlogs etc. 
2. Casual streamers: These are people who want to try out what streaming is about and whether they want to get serious about it. These are friends getting together and recording themselves etc. They are not too interested in monetization but would not mind a quick pay off.
3. Basic streamers: These are users who are using Twitch for other purposes i.e. uploading content for private use and storage etc.

For the purpose of this excercise I will focus on professional streamers as they will the most impacted by changes to Twitch ads platform. 

Use-cases/Painpoints:

So lets break this down to understand which parts of the value chain to focus on:

1. Creators do not have direct control over when ads run on their content. My guess is they have a toggle that allows them to "Monetize" their content and then Twitch backend systems take over the heavy lifting
2. Creators get a bigger cut of the revenue if they run ad spots off platform
3. For standard on platform ads, Twitch will have an advertisers facing tool which will give the marketers an idea of targeting cohorts with certain interests like: interested in outdoor sports; interested in decorations etc.

Here we have an option to look at creator facing tools or advertising facing tools. I will go for the first option as #1, it is directly linked with our problem statement of 'helping' our creators and #2 because there might be some interesting solutions here that can potentially scale really well across creators. 

As a creator:

1. I would like to get higher rev share for the ads that show up on my videos
2. I would like to know what are best practices for better monetization i.e. managing ad loads on my videos etc
3. I would like to run experiements on different formats/types so I know what works best for my audiance
4. I would like to know directly from my viewers of the kind of ad formats they enjoy so I can customise
5. I would like to be able to choose what brands that show up against my videos
6. I would like to be able to choose which format of ads (Mid-roll; pre-roll, banner etc) show up
7. I would like to know how ads targeting works so I can improve my videos
8. I would like my videos to be discoverable in premium spots (or premium times) and I am willing to pay for it
9. I would like to reduce the overhead of managing merch etc on my channel

I am going to quickly break these down in two the below buckets so that I can get in to some solutions:

Table stakes: 2, 3, 7 

Incremental: 4, 5, 6, 8 

Moonshots: 1, 9

For this excercise I am going to focus on Moonshots

Solutions and Scoring:

Solution 1: Higher Rev Share

1. While this is an obvious one, it usually does not neatly fall in the 'improve the product' category easily. However it can serve as an incentive as I explain below.
2. This can scale really well with more creators moving efforts from 'off platform ads' to 'on platform ads' driving a higher adoption of all the tools/solutions (if developed) I had mentioned in 2-8

Solution 2: Better Merch Tools

1. For Twitch to tap in to the 'off platform ads' (e.g. a creator calls out an advertiser in the video through placements/shout-outs etc vs. using twitch platform) 
2. Given that Twitch is owned by the biggest e-commerce platform in the world, I would like Amazon and Twitch to work together to provide tooling for creators to help their partners to be able to refer/find the merchandise easily on Twitch (through a UI to select and buy content) or link out to Amazon where all parties can earn revenue (creators get referral, twitch get attribution of downstream conversion from Amazon, Amazon makes revenue on new traffic channel)

Summarize and success criteria:

From a success criteria standpoint, I am going to summarize by looking at high-level business metrics vs. feature level metrics which we should setup anyway. The high-level metrics I will be interested in are:

• % increase in ads spots per view
• % increase in ads revenue per view (this will take care of both solution 1 and 2)
• % increase in monetizable videos and channels on the platform
• % increase in referal revenue (attributable to Twitch)
• Improvement in creator CSAT for creator tools

Of the two solutions, while #1 will probably drive the biggest uptick in the metrics, it can prove to be pretty contentious as it can have lasting downstream impact on the industry i.e. driving down rev share can become a slipery slope. This is also a position that Twitch will find extremely hard to reverse if they decide to go down this route. 

I will go with solution #2 as it leans in to the competitive advantage that Amazon brings to the table and ads a new revenue stream to both businesses. 

Disclairmer: This took me exactly 1 hour and 5 minutes to complete. I think I could have saved some time if I had not spent time on formating. I think if I were in a speaking environment it would move a bit quicker as well. Feedback welcome. This is my first attempt here.