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Facebook shorted video creators thousands of dollars in ad revenue

Illustration by William Joel / The Verge

Due to a ‘technical issue’

Britain Lockhart never knows what he’ll find when he scuba dives for treasure. Neither do his viewers on Facebook who tune in for a surprise reveal. His page, Depths of History, has been steadily growing on the social network since he started posting videos there about two years ago. He now has 70,000 followers on his page, which has started generating thousands of dollars a month in ad revenue.

“I really didn’t think it would be that profitable at all, but Facebook has such a variety of users on their interface that don’t even use YouTube, but they’ll be on Facebook,” he says, adding that he’ll post his YouTube videos on Facebook to make ad revenue on both.

His income varies, although he says he’ll typically make between $2,000 and $3,000 per month through Facebook. But in 2021 so far, that income has unexpectedly dried up. The January payout was only $931, leaving him thousands of dollars short. In February, it was even lower, coming in at just $664. He double-checked his creator backend, and the numbers didn’t make sense there, either. Facebook’s revenue estimation tool projected that he should have received $3,397 for January and $1,747.52 for February. When the checks came in, he ended more than $4,000 short

“It was like a slap in the face,” Lockhart says. “I was looking forward to buying more camera gear to increase my business, buying things that could prolong me working with Facebook and me working with YouTube.”

And he’s not the only one who hasn’t been entirely paid out. The Verge spoke with two other Facebook video creators, all of whom say the company shorted them on cash and ignored their requests for help. The creators had no reason to initially question the amount they were paid since Facebook’s estimated revenue tool almost always mirrored their actual payouts. Usually, they’d be short only a couple hundred dollars. But after their revenue seemed off two months in a row, the creators say they looked into the issue. All three say the problems began in January, around the time Facebook transitioned to its new Pages experience and made updates to how creators can monetize.

The sudden change is particularly alarming because of Facebook’s ambiguous approach to revenue-sharing in general. The company’s core business has always been direct, targeted advertising, but Facebook now sees an opportunity in sharing revenue with video creators, along the lines of YouTube or Twitch. Facebook has courted all sorts of creators — gamers, writers, and video hosts — through broader monetization options, like in-stream ads, shopping, and even subscription newsletters. It’s still unclear how many creators are on Facebook, but the strategy seems to be somewhat working. Facebook says there are more than 1 million shops across its app and Instagram, and that from 2019 to 2020, the number of content creators on Facebook earning the equivalent of $10,000 USD per month grew 88 percent, and creators earning $1,000 per month grew 94 percent.

But these creators say Facebook only cares about advertisers, leaving them with no one to turn to when their payments are unexpectedly short. They reached out for help, but the company gave them no feedback on what could be wrong.

After The Verge reached out for comment, however, Facebook said it “resolved a technical issue that prevented a small number of video creators on Facebook from receiving their full in-stream ads payouts.”

“We’re notifying these partners that they’ll receive those remaining in-stream payments during the April payout cycle, and we apologize for any inconvenience,” a spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

It’s good news for the creators getting a rebate but still an alarming precedent — holding thousands of dollars back for months with little explanation or guarantee the same problem won’t pop up again in the future.

Volodymyr Popkov, the creator of the page Painting Inspiration, which demos acrylic paint art tutorials, suggests that Facebook doesn’t value the creators who make the platform thrive. “They have live chat Facebook support for the people who spend money for the ads, who bring [Facebook] their money, but for people who are like us, the creators, they owe us money right now, and they’re not doing anything,” he says.

Facebook estimated that Popkov would get $13,000 in January, he says, but he only received $4,600. In February, he was estimated to receive $29,000 but made only $6,400. He knows the number is just an estimate, but he says he hasn’t seen any change in the numbers of viewers on his videos — at least not enough to explain a $32,000 shortfall. It’s a particular problem because Popkov employs artists to make artwork for the page. His Facebook income serves as payroll for them, along with his revenue from YouTube.

Another creator, Erik Reed, of the Outdoors With Erik page, says he’s owed over $10,000, going off the estimate tools. He specifically joined Facebook because other creators told him the monetization options and engagement levels were worthwhile.

Facebook has a long history of shoddy metrics causing problems for partners. Earlier this month, court documents showed that Facebook provided advertisers with “inflated and misleading” metrics for years on how many people their ads were reaching. The company apparently knew that the reach of these ads was amplified by fake and duplicate accounts, but chose not to delete them. A Facebook spokesperson told The Verge at the time that this reach tool provided only “an estimate,” although Facebook allegedly knew advertisers based decisions around the metric. The company also previously faced a lawsuit that claimed it knowingly overestimated how much video content users watched. Facebook settled the suit in 2019.

The creators who spoke with The Verge have all diversified away from Facebook to avoid being overdependent on one platform; they all run YouTube channels along with their Facebook Pages as well as with other social pages. For the revenue-sharing model to work, Facebook needs creators to stay happy and posting. But increasingly, creators are skeptical of the company’s incentives.

“Working with platforms is hard,” Popkov says. “And you’re not working on your [own] platform, so it’s not like I can trust them.”

A top Twitch streamer has been live for nearly two weeks straight

On Friday, the Twitch streamer Ludwig slept in. He got up around 11AM PT and lay in bed, chatting with the more than 30,000 viewers of his stream. He’s spent a lot of time in that spot lately — in fact, he’s broadcast dozens of hours of himself curled up in a bright red race car bed since his stream first started.

As of this morning, Sunday, March 28th, Ludwig’s stream has now been live for nearly two weeks straight. His stream started around 2PM PT on Sunday, March 14th, according to The New York Times. The plan was to stream 20 seconds for every new subscription purchased to his channel (subscriptions are $5 per month).

It’s a bit like a telethon — he won’t stop so long as the money kept coming in. “We’re making this like a goddamn vending machine,” Ludwig said just a few hours into the first day of his stream.

The stream has turned into an event for Twitch viewers. Ludwig was already a star on Twitch when the stream began (the unofficial site TwitchTracker ranks him as the 11th most popular English-language channel), and as the days have gone on, he’s become the most subscribed to streamer on the site. Twitch has promoted the stream prominently on its front page and even wished the streamer goodnight.

As he neared the two-week milestone on Saturday, Ludwig had to step away from the stream for the day and invited friends to take over. To make sure the marathon stream didn’t end while he was out, he ran a subscription promotion to run up the timer.

“Subathons” have been happening on Twitch for years, and some have even extended for days in the past. In April, the streamer LosPollosTV went for more than six days, setting what was believed to be a live streaming record at the time. (Other streams have gone for longer since, but without running subathons the entire time.)

As his stream showed no sign of stopping, Ludwig has added some constraints. Subscriptions now add only 10 seconds to the clock. Viewers are limited to purchasing 100 gift subscriptions each. He’s also set a 31 day cap before he’ll sign off no matter what.

It’s not clear if he’ll reach that point. Over the course of this week, subscriptions have been slowing. There were 37 hours left on the clock as of 8AM ET Wednesday morning, but only 22 hours left as of 8AM ET Friday morning. As of this publication, the timer has been hovering just above and then periodically below 12 hours for some time — with subs still coming in to keep the clock relatively static throughout Saturday night and into Sunday morning — and now sits at roughly 11.5 hours.

Razer’s Project Hazel RGB Face Mask Is Becoming a Real Product

(Image credit: Razer)

If you’ve ever wished your face mask had more tech, you might not have to wait too much longer. Razer confirmed this week that its RGB-clad, voice-modifying face mask will eventually be a real Razer product you can buy.

Razer first showed off a prototype of Project Hazel during the CES 2021 tech trade show in January. This week, during The Tom’s Hardware Show livestream, Mike Scharnikow, Razer senior marketing manager, confirmed that Razer is moving forward with Project Hazel and its robust set of tech.

“We’ve had a lot of great…feedback on this from CES as a prototype, and it’s something that we’re actually moving out of the prototype stage on, and out of the concept stage and taking this on the path to productization,” Scharnikow told Tom’s Hardware.

Scharnikow demoed the mask, which is N95-compliant with active air ventilation. Not all tech concepts come to market. And if they do, they sometimes look different from the prototype. But Razer seems to be moving forward with a lot of the features detailed on the Project Hazel prototype, like a speaker array that uses Razer’s voice amplifier tech to ”take your voice from inside the mask and recreate it out in a very crisp, clear, natural manner to the outside world,” Scharnikow said. There’s also customizable RGB that can provide battery information and a silicone band to seal the mask against your face to prevent glasses from fogging up.

Razer is known for making some of the best gaming keyboards and other PC gaming-focused products, but Scharnikow pointed out that it’s been involved in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic as well, including converting some of its manufacturing facilities to make masks and donating over 1 million masks to medical facilities.

(Image credit: Razer)

So far we’ve seen Project Hazel in black or white, but if it’s successful we may see additional options. Scharnikow noted that Razer has a history of bringing new color options to its products.

“First we want to get this out, make sure it’s a great product, make sure it’s something that our fans and our customers love and are really using in the best way possible. And then we can figure out ways to put different colors on it for personalization and the like,” the exec told us.

Scharnikow couldn’t share a release date for Project Hazel but said those details will be available in “the coming months.”

Still don’t believe Project Hazel will really hit shelves? Well, Scharnikow isn’t the only one talking about the mask. Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan also told Yahoo Finance this week that Razer is “going to proceed in making it a reality and ship the smart mask.”

Watch the full video above for more from Razer’s appearance on The Tom’s Hardware Show, including what’s up with that RGB toaster.

You can catch The Tom’s Hardware Show every Thursday at 3 p.m. ET on YouTube, Facebook, Twitch and as a podcast.

A streamer is staying live for as long as people keep subscribing

Twitch streamer Ludwig Ahgren has been live since March 14th, and today marked the fourth continuous day of his broadcast. The reason? Every time someone subscribes to his channel, it adds 10 seconds to the amount of time he plans to remain live. In other words: Ahgren is running an uncapped subathon because he’ll stay up as long as viewers keep subscribing.

Since he’s one of the most popular streamers on Twitch — with 1.8 million followers as of this writing — it means Ahgren’s going to be live for at least a couple more days. (As of this writing, he’s got another 57 hours to go.) Yesterday, when he went to sleep for the night in his red racecar bed, he even managed to become the top streamer on Twitch.

This isn’t actually against Twitch’s TOS. A Twitch spokesperson emailed The Verge a statement, clarifying that they, too, have been watching the stream pretty closely and maintaining that Ahgren isn’t violating any of their rules. “Our Community Guidelines do not prohibit sleeping on stream, however we expect streamers to take proper precautions to ensure their stream and chat are being monitored and attended to,” wrote a spokesperson.

While he’s been awake, Ahgren’s been streaming games with friends; while he’s asleep, his mods have been running videos chosen by the community. As Nathan Grayson wrote in Kotaku: “It’s basically a big, bleary-eyed slumber party where everyone’s just vibing.” (While subathons are a thing in the Twitch community, they rarely go longer than, say, 30-something hours.)

Twitch is a wonderfully immediate place online. You can see and interact with the people on your screen in real time, which feels like a kind of intimacy. Ahgren’s stream is well on its way to becoming an event in Twitch’s history, akin to Twitch Plays Pokémon and any of its other site-wide memes. It’s incredible to me that as big as it is, Twitch still has its own distinct culture and its own set of stars who seem to do stunts like this just because they seem cool.

But historicizing can wait. Right now, Ahgren’s live, and it’s wonderful.

Chrome can now instantly caption audio and video on the web

Google is expanding its real-time caption feature, Live Captions, from Pixel phones to anyone using a Chrome browser, as first spotted by XDA Developers. Live Captions uses machine learning to spontaneously create captions for videos or audio where none existed before, and making the web that much more accessible for anyone who’s deaf or hard of hearing.

When enabled, Live Captions automatically appear in a small, moveable box in the bottom of your browser when you’re watching or listening to a piece of content where people are talking. Words appear after a slight delay, and for fast or stuttering speech, you might spot mistakes. But in general, the feature is just as impressive as it was when it first appeared on Pixel phones in 2019. Captions will even appear with muted audio or your volume turned down, making it a way to “read” videos or podcasts without bugging others around you.

Live Captions captioning audio from a podcast player

Chrome’s Live Captions worked on YouTube videos, Twitch streams, podcast players, and even music streaming services like SoundCloud in early tests run by a few of us here at The Verge. However, it seems that Live Captions in Chrome only work in English, which is also the case on mobile.

Live Captions can be enabled in the latest version of Chrome by going to Settings, then the “Advanced” section, and then “Accessibility.” (If you’re not seeing the feature, try manually updating and restarting your browser.) When you toggle them on, Chrome will quickly download some speech recognition files, and then captions should appear the next time your browser plays audio where people are talking.

Live Captions were first introduced in the Android Q beta, but until today, they were exclusive to some Pixel and Samsung phones. Now that they’re on Chrome, Live Captions will be available to a much wider audience.

Why Facebook is getting in the newsletter game

Today let’s talk about platforms’ growing interest in building newsletter tools — and whether Facebook, against all conventional wisdom, might have an opportunity there.

I.

Newsletters made headlines today after Facebook announced a plan laying out some of its intentions in the space. In a blog post entitled “Supporting independent writers,” the company explained its point of view and sketched out the products it is now building. Campbell Brown, the company’s vice president for global news partnerships, and Anthea Watson Strong, a product manager for news, laid it out:

A free, self-publishing tool with robust styling options to create individual websites and an email newsletter
An integration with Facebook Pages to enable publishing across various multimedia formats including photos, live videos, and stories
The ability to create Facebook groups and nurture a community of readers

In addition, Facebook plans to offer features to help writers find audiences and sell subscriptions, as well as analytics tools and an accelerator program “to help creators come together and learn best practices.”

Before I go any further, let me acknowledge my conflicts here. As noted in my ethics statement, I receive a health care subsidy and legal support from Substack, the company with which Facebook is most prominently competing here. At the same time, it’s in my interest to see lots of newsletter services thriving. As in most things, the more big companies that are competing for writers, the better off most writers will be.

That said, I still find Facebook’s move into newsletters a bit surreal, if only because I started a newsletter in 2017 as an end run around Facebook. Or rather, as an end run around the idea of algorithmic feeds in general. After the better part of a decade chasing audiences from platform to platform, I set out to build a strong, direct connection to an audience that wants to hear from me, and that I can reliably reach no matter how many likes, upvotes, or retweets any individual post happens to get.

I won’t rehearse Facebook’s long history with the news business here, but suffice to say it has been rocky and mostly unsatisfying for just about everyone involved. At the same time, since the clear-eyed and opinionated-in-a-good-way Brown joined the company in 2017, Facebook’s news efforts have gradually bent toward realism. If the Facebook of old promised publishers the moon, the Facebook of today is more likely to promise as little as possible.

But as the platform’s dominance has grown, so has the threat of onerous regulation. As their digital advertising revenues have shrunk, publishers around the world have gotten better at convincing lawmakers that Facebook (and Google) owe them a cut of that revenue. (Australia is the most recent example of this, and it will not be the last.) Facebook has grudgingly paid up, to no real material benefit to society — as I like to say in this space roughly once per day, the United States lost 16,000 journalism jobs last year. Platform subsidies have not been enough to stop the bleeding in the past, and I have no reason to believe they will do so in the future.

Still, demands for those subsidies will only increase over the next year. For platforms, the natural response to those demands is to try to change the laws. Facebook will certainly continue to lobby around the world, but with newsletters it’s attempting a secondary strategy: it’s trying to change the publishers.

Facebook’s oft-repeated mission is to “give people a voice,” and yet for the first decade-plus of its existence, its media partnerships have largely been with big companies like CNN and News Corp. A more Facebook-like approach to media partnerships would be to start at the level of the individual and help people start building their businesses that way.

After a long period of inattention to creators, Facebook has been developing new ways for individuals to make money from their large followings on Instagram. It is doing the same in its Twitch rival, Facebook Gaming — which, incidentally, saw its watch time grow 79 percent last year. Viewed in this light, turning individual writers into successful tiny media companies feels like a logical next step.

Not to say that Facebook’s newsletter ambitions have been received particularly warmly. “Facebook Has Found a New Way to Ruin Media,” a headline in The New Republic announced today. Jacob Silverman’s piece doesn’t really say anything specific about how Facebook newsletters would “ruin the media”; instead, it recounts how difficult the media business is for the people who work in it, and it casts doubt on the idea that solo entrepreneurs and small groups of collaborators can do much to change that. (My humble retort is that, uh, maybe we could try it first?)

Certainly there are questions that any would-be media mogul should ask before throwing in with Facebook, and I asked the company a couple. For starters, will these “individual websites” be hosted on domains controlled by Facebook or the author? (If the author, yay; if Facebook, run.) Facebook told me it was “too soon to discuss those details.”

Second, will Facebook take a cut of subscription revenue? No answer there either, but a spokeswoman pointed out that Facebook currently takes no cut from revenue generated by subscriptions initiated through its Instant Articles product, and it has said it will not take a cut of any video creator revenue through at least August. If those are hints that Facebook will take a zero percent commission on newsletter subscription revenue — well, that will get the attention of at least a few creators who are currently giving up 5 or 10 percent.

The third question, and the most important one, I didn’t bother asking: how committed will Facebook be to these creators over the long term? Much of journalists’ enmity toward the company stems from the fact that what the platform amplifies changes all the time, making it shaky ground on which to build a business. But even assuming that Facebook’s enthusiasm for newsletters wanes over time, it might not be as catastrophic to the individual as the pivot to video was for big publishers. As long as creators can export their mailing lists and customer relationships when the time comes, they may find that the hassle was worth it.

II.

Those are all questions about what’s in it for creators, though. Perhaps just as interesting is what’s in it for Facebook.

On the surface, it may not seem obvious why the company would take an interest in helping people build businesses off the platform. But that view is rooted in the company’s old view of the News Feed, as a place that blended posts from your friends with links to articles from publishers on the open web.

Two years ago, though, Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company would gradually shift its product development to focus on private messaging and groups. And groups are the real opportunity for Facebook when it comes to newsletters.

The historian Heather Cox Richardson is the most successful individual authors on Substack, on track to earn more than $1 million in subscription revenue this year. Many of her subscribers come from her Facebook page, which has 1.4 million followers. For most of us on Substack, newsletters offer a way to monetize our Twitter followings. But if you’re a Facebook executive, you look at Richardson and wonder whether you couldn’t help more people monetize their Facebook pages.

If Facebook could do that, and create a thousand Richardsons around the world, it would prove that the company can support a different kind of publishing, giving it a shiny new talking point as it wrestles with lawmakers around the world. And it would help to realize the company’s visions for groups as the starting point for many, or even most, of the discussions that the average person has on the platform.

That looks like a win-win for Facebook and ought to give prospective participants in this new experiment at least some confidence that the company’s commitment is real. (It’s also notable to me that Facebook announced these tools months before they are publicly available — a sign that the company wants them to be on the mind of anyone considering making a move in the short term, particularly those who have large Facebook followings and might otherwise consider Substack or the newly Twitter-owned Revue.)

Anyway, I don’t know if any of this will work for Facebook. But it seems clear to me why the company would want to try.

III.

Another reason why Facebook might have an opportunity is that Substack seems intent on giving them one.

Some writers on the platform have been unhappy since Substack published a blog post last week announcing its “Pros” program, in which it offers some writers big advances to lure them to the platform. The list of writers to whom advances have been offered is not public, and I believe it to be more diverse than the public conversation over the past week has made it out to be. But among the Pros who have been open about their involvement, most of them are white and male like me. (I was offered an advance last year but turned it down, though I accepted other benefits, as disclosed above. If Substack considers me part of the “Pro” program, I am not aware of it.)

The blog post characterized the decision to offer advances as “business decisions, not editorial ones,” which came across as wishful thinking. Meanwhile, some of the people who have taken advances have written various offensive things, both on and off Substack, and now some other writers are wondering whether remaining on the platform makes them complicit. (The logic is that their paid subscriptions are generating revenue that will then be used to fund further advances for people who attack journalists, or stoke fears about transgender people, and so on.)

Amid all this, Substack CEO Chris Best tweeted, without any other context, “Defund the thought police,” seeming to side with the platform’s most lucrative edgelords over its more centrist and liberal creators. I’ve since received a few inquiries from writers asking whether being associated with Substack will damage their reputations over the long term.

If I were Substack, I would take pains to demonstrate that the platform offers financial support to creators across the political spectrum and draws hard lines around targeted harassment and bigotry. I would hire a really good head of communications and give her the passwords to the founders’ Twitter accounts. I would lean all the way away from the culture war — and toward building products and services that generate more revenue, for more people, than anyone else does.

Because if Substack doesn’t, someone else will.

And it might just be Mark Zuckerberg.

This column was co-published with Platformer, a daily newsletter about Big Tech and democracy.

Twitch makes it easier for streamers to wipe out their old videos to avoid copyright strikes

Twitch announced in an email to streamers that the site has added new tools today to help creators see where they stand with takedown requests and copyright strikes. Twitch also added tools to let streamers mass delete their recorded streams. It’s a smart move because it gives streamers better tools to play on the right side of copyright law. (If you don’t, and you rack up enough copyright strikes, you get permabanned.)

Although, it might make you wonder why the site didn’t have this particular functionality in the first place. As the email makes clear: these new features are a direct consequence of the flurry of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedowns streamers received last year.

Now, in the event that a streamer gets hit with a DMCA takedown request, it’ll show up in their on-site inbox; Twitch’s video producer will also show the number of copyright strikes a channel has received. In addition, streamers can now unpublish or delete all their VODs at once (or in batches of 20 at a time).

The last part of Twitch’s missive laid out a roadmap for new features in the latter half of this year that should allow streamers more control over their recorded content. The big one to look forward to: Twitch will eventually allow streamers to delete clips of their channel, sorting by game, date, or view count.

Archivists are trying to chronicle Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ unforgettable first year

The challenge of documenting a virtual world

“The serendipity of the time [Animal Crossing: New Horizons] came out is ridiculous,” says Lex Roberts, curator of the UK National Videogame Museum’s Animal Crossing Diaries. The project aims to capture “the cultural phenomenon that followed the release of Animal Crossing … in March 2020, just as the world was transformed by the pandemic.”

New Horizons has been inextricably associated with COVID-19, with early reviews making mention of how much we all needed an escape as lockdowns and quarantines suddenly became our lives. As it became apparent that social distancing would be around for a long time, the game became the location of weddings, memorials, protests, and political campaigning, to name just a few.

But it’s not possible to experience the same New Horizons as the one everyone was playing in the spring of 2020. “You can’t play the game and understand how people used it and what the experience of playing it in the [early days of the] pandemic was,” says Roberts.

Kelsey Lewin, co-director of the Video Game History Foundation, notes that the social experience has changed as people have moved on. “[Early on], a co-worker from six years ago just kind of randomly wandered into my town, because everyone was playing and my gates were open,” she says. “If you were to just randomly show up unannounced to someone’s island [now], it’s not going to be taken in the same way.”

“What’s important for the future is making sure that we have some kind of record of what the game was like in these moments of time,” she says. That’s what the National Videogame Museum is aiming for, and that requires more than just being able to access a Nintendo Switch and a game cartridge.

“It’s something that we’ve wanted to do at the Museum for a little while,” says its marketing and communications lead Conor Clarke. “A lot of video game history and preservation looks at the technological advancement of games and doesn’t really cast too much of an eye at the cultural history around games.”

The serendipity of New Horizons’ release date was their opportunity to try something new. The Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, a grant-making charity, asked for cultural heritage organizations to “collect the history as it’s happening,” says Clarke, and the museum’s application to use the game for that purpose was successful.

“Playing a game is not necessarily the best way of understanding a game,” says Roberts. Instead, the open call asks for whatever kind of data volunteers might want to offer up. “We’ve had … audio recordings, we’ve had video recordings of people speaking to camera, we’ve had people writing diary entries of their experience, photo diaries of ‘this is the progression of my island over the last year.’ We’ve had some really interesting essays of people really reflecting on their experience and things that have happened.”

Lewin and Roberts both emphasize the value of paying attention to the ordinary within the turbulence of 2020. “It’s really important that we were able to capture the protests and all of the huge pandemic-related events … that have been expressed in AC, but also the everyday. We’re really keen to not miss out on those everyday experiences like the date nights and hanging out with friends,” says Roberts. They give an example of an entry where the person’s Joy-Con had broken, meaning they started playing on the television while in lockdown with their family. “It meant that their family started to see what they were doing … and the parents got really into it.”

“There’s so much more than what gets reported on happening that is still very meaningful,” says Lewin. “What’s going to be important is that we’ve documented what it was like to play … what was going on at the time, what was the context, what was the community interested in and talking about, and what were the social dynamics that were going on.”

This is something that in some ways is easier today than it used to be. “Because people weren’t interviewing children on playgrounds back then, if you’re talking about a game from the ‘80s or something, [magazines] are really all we have,” says Lewin. “But Twitter is the new playground discussion, right?”

This is, at least in part, what digital humanities aims to explore, though scholars Quinn Dombrowski and Liz Grumbach say a complete definition is evasive. “If we put it in our own words then as many people will disagree as agree,” laughs Dombrowski, who works in the department of literatures, cultures, and languages at Stanford.

Grumbach, who leads the Digital Humanities Initiative at Arizona State University, obligingly gives it her best shot. “What I usually say is that it is either using digital tools to explore something that humanists would research or it is using humanities methodologies to explore the digital… or it is both at the same time. And when it’s both at the same time is when it’s really, really cool.”

The two have been running a series of lightning talks where other scholars in the digital humanities have been invited to speak from within Dombrowski’s Animal Crossing island. Attendees can either visit in the game or watch on Twitch. Though the talks typically aren’t about Animal Crossing itself, they have some insight into why it might have become so popular especially during the early months of the pandemic.

“I think what Animal Crossing does so well is that it captures the feeling of travel in a time where we cannot travel to see the people that we care about,” says Grumbach. She and Dombrowski are old friends, and they discovered that playing Animal Crossing “feels like we’re hanging out,” in a way that’s more personable than a voice or video call, or even other virtual spaces that try to simulate physical ones, like Gather. The island setting helps; Grumbach calls it a “really joyful environment.”

“One of the things that I like about Animal Crossing compared to some of those other platforms is the fact that it’s personal,” adds Dombrowski. “When you go to someone’s island, this is something that they’ve spent a lot of time putting together just the way they like it … and you can water their plants for them, and their physical digital presence is something where they’ve customized the way they look.”

The idea of putting together a COVID archive was a popular one in the digital humanities last March. Though Grumbach and Dombrowski do caution that there are potential ethical considerations around asking people to process these events while simultaneously sharing them for analysis and consumption, the former highlighted Arizona State’s Journal of the Plague Year, and the latter has also written some of their own thoughts about playing New Horizons during the pandemic.

Coming up on the anniversary, museum researchers are beginning to think about what kind of exhibition they’ll put together with the data they’ve gathered. “We tried really, really hard when we opened this project up not to make assumptions about what people would submit, so we haven’t planned the exhibition,” says Roberts. “So that’s a really exciting next stage.”

They’ve been considering themes as submissions roll in, mentioning examples like a recent collection on love they put together for Valentine’s Day, people expressing creativity through filmmaking and comics, as well as how people have formed relationships with the non-playable villagers in the game. And, echoing Dombrowski and Grumbach, they note that many submissions appear to view New Horizons as a specific place in a way that other social games, like Mario Kart, wouldn’t be.

The museum hopes that this will be a springboard for more cultural history projects in the future. “We’re constantly looking at … different ways of exhibiting games history,” says Clarke. “We’re constantly trying to innovate and try new things there because it’s a really interesting topic. Video games are a really difficult topic to exhibit!”

“You just have to think about: what is going to be important to know about this game in 100 years? What is it that we want to keep? And not an easy question to answer,” Lewin says. “But if we want to do a good job of actually preserving video game history, those are the questions we need to be asking.”

“I think it’s imperative to be gathering and collecting all of this stuff now before we’re trying to scramble and find it and pick up the pieces later.”

Twitch and Facebook Gaming exploded during the pandemic — and they’re even bigger a year later

Today, StreamElements and its partner, analytics company Rainmaker.gg, have put out the February issue of their “State of the Stream” report. It’s something of a fascinating document because, as the end of the pandemic draws near, it’s another piece of evidence that live-streaming platforms were one of the winners of the crisis. (You know, assuming there can be winners to a global mass death event.)

The biggest finding in this month’s report is that, in terms of hours watched, both Twitch and Facebook Gaming are up around 80 percent year over year. To be slightly more specific: Twitch has grown by 82 percent, while Facebook Gaming grew by 79 percent. For Twitch, that translates to more than 1.8 billion hours of watch time in February; Facebook Gaming, on the other hand, cleared 400 million hours. (For reference: in March 2020, as the pandemic was beginning, Twitch cleared 1.1 billion watch hours. And last April, Facebook Gaming had crossed 291 million hours watched.)

Those numbers are both massive and, I think, durable: both figures are actually a decrease from January, which was a longer month. To me, that suggests that the total number of people who watch live streams has materially increased over the course of the global coronavirus pandemic.

That said: those numbers don’t reflect the ongoing vaccine rollout — which, in the US, has only recently started ramping up exponentially. I’ll be interested to see if the numbers go down as the world returns to some semblance of normalcy. Even if they do, this hellish season of our lives has pulled live-streaming as a practice firmly into the mainstream.

Twitching Over Taxes? Here’s What Streamers Can Deduct

(Image credit: Shutterstock)

Filing taxes can be daunting, especially if you’re a professional streamer. Every penny that you make via Twitch, YouTube, or any other content creation platform needs to be reported. I’ve spoken to various CPAs, Tax Auditors, and tax filing companies to find some best practices when filing taxes as content creators.

Editor’s Note: We contacted a number of tax professionals and researched several sources for this story. But it is meant to be general guidance, not professional legal advice. Please speak to a tax professional about these and other filing concerns before submitting your tax return.

You’ll notice that, when you level up to Affiliate status with Twitch, the company asks you to fill out a tax form. Once you do so from any business you are responsible for reporting that income. At the end of the year, these companies will send you a 1099/ W9 if you’ve made $600 or more.

Twitch Yearly Payout Less Than $600

If you have not made at least $600 on their platform, Twitch is not obligated to send you a 1099 form, but you are still obligated to keep track of your earnings and report them to the IRS on a Schedule C.

If you agree to Twitch’s Affiliate/Partnership program but do not fill out a W9 to specify how much taxes should be withheld, the company automatically withholds up to 30%, as stated on Twitch.tv.

Non-U.S. residents are also subject to U.S. income taxes. “In most cases, a foreign person is subject to U.S. tax on its U.S. source income. Most types of U.S. source income received by a foreign person are subject to U.S. tax of 30%”, the IRS website states.

Hobbyist vs Self Employed

If you are planning to make money as a content creator, freelancer, or streamer you are self-employed and run your own business as a freelancer. According to IRS.gov, if you earn more than $400 in a year, you are subject to self-employment taxes of 15.3%, which go into retirement and medicare and must file 1040 or 1040-SR forms.

Also, you must determine if your streaming income is classified as a business or a hobby. If it’s a business, you can deduct expenses. The IRS lists nine criteria for determining whether something classifies as a business, including:

“Whether you were successful in making a profit in similar activities in the past.
Whether the activity makes a profit in some years and how much profit it makes.
Whether you can expect to make a future profit from the appreciation of the assets used in the activity.”

Kari Brummond, Tax Preparer with Tax Debt Help said, “When you have self-employment income, the IRS considers you to be a small business owner and lets you write off your business expenses. This includes everything you purchase to support your streaming business — microphones, PCs, cameras, and streaming software are all deductible…”

If you constantly are losing money year after year as a content creator, the IRS will automatically determine you to be a hobbyist instead of a business. If you are spending more money on equipment than you are earning, it is a sign that you are losing money as a creator.

Turbo Tax suggests keeping copies of receipts throughout the year and, if possible, using a business credit card to differentiate between content creator purchases and everyday purchases. Get oil changes at the beginning of the year so you can have proof of your mileage. These bookkeeping tips will help you determine if you are losing money and your yearly expenses.

Deductible Expenses for Streamers

Ms. ZaCorra Bronson, a Tax Professional with W.E.B.S. Tax Preparation & Bookkeeping Services states, “[Since passage of] the Tax Cuts and Job Act, it is harder to deduct expenses because it increased the standard deduction by almost half but eliminated many previous eligible deductions as well. Fees for tax preparation or investment management are no longer eligible deductibles.”

According to the IRS, deductible expenses for any business include rent, travel and assets (which could include equipment).

CPA Travis Guterman said that, as a content creator, your expenses can include internet services, Xbox subscriptions, games bought, computer equipment, gaming hardware and video equipment. Guterman offered a few tips to help you calculate how much of your internet and computer equipment you use for business.

“Claiming you use your home internet or telephone for 100% business use is not accurate,” Guterman said. “You’re going to use it for personal matters such as streaming Netflix, communicating with friends and family, and etc.”

If you’re trying to calculate how much is used for personal or business, think about how long you stream or edit videos. If you’re streaming 70 hours a week, there are 168 hours in a week, you use about 40% of your internet for business a week. If you only stream two hours for income, you use less than 10% of your internet for a business in a week. Calculating how much you use an Xbox subscription requires the same calculations.

Writing Off Purchases

(Image credit: Shutterstock)

If you’re using a car for streaming purposes, you can keep track of the miles and deduct them on your taxes. Your business expenses can be write-offs up to a certain amount.

“As a general rule of thumb, you write off the entire cost of small purchases and routine expenses (office rent, electricity software subscription fees) in the year of purchase, and you deduct large expenses such as computers incrementally over time,” Brummond said. “However, the Section 179 deduction lets you claim the full cost of many equipment expenses in the year of purchase.”

Using an EIN Instead of an SSN

If you are in the early stages of creating content you don’t have to file for an LLC just yet, suggests Guterman. If you’d like to acquire a free EIN, you can do so via the IRS.gov website.

Having an EIN doesn’t mean you have to file separate taxes for your business; it just means that you don’t want to give out your social security number to every company you work with. Everything made is added or subtracted from your overall annual income.

Tips and Donations Count as Income

You have to count donations sent to your PayPal, CashApp, or Venmo because those aren’t just gifts; they are part of your income. Ms. Bronson and TurboTax both suggest you subtract the service fees from platforms like PayPal. If someone gives you $30, Paypal charges you three cents per donation, which leaves you with $29.97.

What if You Spent More Than You Made?

I spoke with Guterman about losses and how to calculate them into your income. He gave me this formula. If you buy a new camera that costs $300 but only made $400 from Twitch, your income from that platform would be $100. Or, if you buy a $300 camera, but only make $200 on the platform you’ve lost money and can subtract $100 from your overall income, but you need to itemize those expenses on your Schedule C.

Finding and speaking with an accountant is going to be in your best interest. Using tax preparation software can help you prepare your taxes as well.

Annie M. Yang, Accountant Manager suggests using FreeTaxUSA.com as the cheapest option to file your taxes.

“If you use any other tax software company, they charge around $100 to file a tax return with Schedule C, which is way too much money for someone who earned less than $600 last year from their business,” she said.

The IRS site is a great resource that will also help you file your taxes. You can call 1-800-829-1040 to get answers to your federal tax questions 24 hours a day. The deadline for filing is April 15th. If you need an extension visit IRS.gov.

Stream it yourself

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Here’s what it’s like to craft live on stream

PmsProxy, a partnered Twitch streamer who has 147,000 followers, was tired. Tired of streaming Grand Theft Auto roleplay, and of streaming herself playing games more generally — something she’d been doing nearly every day for around six years. “I didn’t just want to sit and play games all day, I realized,” she says when I reach her by Discord. “I want to either tell a story through roleplay or just do something that made it feel fulfilling, and roleplay wasn’t that.” So she decided to make a change: instead of streaming herself playing games, she’d stream herself making things for her business.

That business was leatherworking. Proxy made the jump from full-time game streamer to full-time crafting streamer at the beginning of this year; it was a nerve-wracking but ultimately necessary step. “It’s been unbelievably different in the best way possible,” she says. “My viewers have gone up, my subs have gone up. And I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that my community members are seeing me be happy, right? They’re seeing me do something that I love.” The people who stayed, she says, want to buy her work and learn how she makes it.

Twitch is usually thought of as a place for streaming video games. And while that reputation is deserved — yes, a lot of people stream their gaming on Twitch — the site also has a surprising breadth of channels. Makers & Crafting is one of them; the category was created in 2018, after Twitch renamed “Hobbies & Crafts” to better represent the many pros who streamed in it (in their words). According to Twitch Tracker, a website that logs Twitch statistics, the category averaged 520 viewers in September 2018, the month it was created. As of January 2021, Makers & Crafting was averaging 1,520 viewers, or about three times more.

The people who stream in the category do everything from embroidery to woodworking; it’s mesmerizing to bounce among them. Makers & Crafting is a warm, welcoming category that feels a little intimate. The streams can run long — I mean, they’re making physical goods — but every streamer I’ve seen seems to vibrate at a slightly different frequency than the people who stream on the rest of the site. They’re calmer. Less frenetic. The vibe is aggressively wholesome. In other words: it’s about as close to an oasis as you can get online.

Streaming anything is difficult. In every broadcast you have to be a host, producer, audio engineer, and video technician — all at the same time. Streaming your crafts, however, is harder: making things for an audience is a special kind of difficult, especially if the products you’re making are eventually going to be sold. What’s perhaps more interesting is how learning crafts has changed with the accessibility of the internet. Proxy and another streamer and woodworker I spoke to, WorkedLettuce3 — whose handle was chosen by the Xbox gamertag gods — both learned their crafts from the internet.

“I watched a lot of YouTube videos,” he says. “I just never thought it would be something I would take up. Because, you know, a lot of woodworking YouTubers in particular, they like to flex their shop, they like to flex all the hundreds of thousands of dollars they spent on their tools, right? And, yeah, I mean, that was never gonna be me.” Even so, he found a channel that he says motivated him to be a woodworker — one that emphasized that you didn’t need tons of gear to pick it up as a hobby. “I’m very, very glad I found it because I’ve been loving just messing around woodworking, hanging out with people in the garage like we’ve been doing now,” he says.

Proxy also learned some of the tools of her leatherworking trade from the internet. Her foray into the Makers & Crafting section coincided with the first time she tried her hand at leatherworking. “I started leather crafting January of this year. Like my first time really getting my hands on my own stuff was in January,” she says. “But I spent the last year researching. So starting in 2019 and all through 2020, I did nothing but watch YouTube videos and Instagram videos. I did tons of research.” Proxy says she’s always been gifted in working with her hands. Leatherworking is just the most recent outlet. (She also went to art school.)

Lettuce is in a similar position; before six months ago, he’d never sawn a board in half.

He’d never streamed before, either. His first streaming setup was just streaming directly to Twitch from his phone; these days, he’s got a dedicated PC in his garage, a couple webcams, and the TV from his living room to read chat on. And his chat is important: among his viewers are veteran woodworkers and other crafters, along with people who’ve just stopped by to watch. The woodworkers help him when he’s stuck; he says there are people there who have coached him through his entire woodworking career. That kind of interaction is unique to Twitch, and to the Makers & Crafting section in particular.

Even so, he says he finds woodworking on stream scary sometimes. “Like, before the first time I turned my table saw on, I was terrified. Before I turned my router on for the first time, I was terrified. Before I ran a circular saw for the first time, I was terrified,” he says. And he did fall into some bad habits — like reading chat from his phone while working on things. “My chat would see me reading the chat from my phone. And a couple people in there just like stepped in and they were like, ‘Yo, like, for real. You can’t be doing that.’” He credits chat with keeping him honest.

“No one is coming in to backseat you,” says Proxy. “They’re not like, ‘Oh, you should go here and you should do this. And oh, you didn’t kill my favorite boss.’” Viewers are there to watch someone make something, and maybe learn a little in the process.

Proxy also makes just about everything in her store live on stream. Which she says is intimidating but also rewarding — because viewers (who are also buyers) can see exactly how much labor goes into making what they’ve bought. “They get to see what work is actually being put into this,” she says. “It’s not just, you know, a quick two hours, and it’s done. It’s a grueling two hours. Like everything is hand cut, and hand stitched and glued and stamped.”

Not everyone sells what they make on stream. Another crafter I spoke to, LaserGeekCreations, says that he doesn’t usually create the things that show up in his shop on stream. “Mainly because a lot of the stuff that’s on my Etsy shop is like, quick and easy to make,” he says. “It’s kind of boring to make a lot of the time.” (He assuages this boredom by creating things like a giant wooden dinosaur, which he also destroyed on stream.) LaserGeekCreations also happens to be the streamer who raided Lettuce when he was just starting out — which gave Lettuce his first real start on Twitch.

It’s not all fun and games on Twitch. The larger viewer community can sometimes be brutally toxic to people who don’t fit its notions of who can and can’t be a streamer; recently, Twitch partner Negaoryx lamented, at Twitch’s 2020 Participation Ceremony event, that the chat was targeting presenters with tons of hate speech.

There’s more than 42,000+ viewers watching the Twitch Participation Ceremony on the offical @Twitch channel now. Users in chat are spewing hate speech & harassing the guest streamers. 3 mod names in the chat list but since I’ve been watching, have seen ZERO messages get deleted.

— negaoryx (@negaoryx) January 23, 2021

Makers & Crafting feels different, though. It’s smaller, for one thing. But all the people I’ve spoken to who’ve been involved with the category think it’s a uniquely welcoming space nestled within the larger Twitch community. “It was almost like — it’s gonna sound fucking hilarious — but it was almost like walking into a warm hug,” says Proxy. “It was just like everyone was so welcome.” During her first week in the section, Proxy says she went from getting around 100 viewers to getting more than 500. They were leatherworkers and other crafters; they dropped tips and ideas and support.

Lettuce had a similarly warm experience. “The Makers & Crafting community is — I’m gonna say in my opinion, but I’m pretty sure it’s a fact — that they’re the most welcoming and loving community-minded community I’ve ever seen in my entire life.” Once the pandemic is over, Lettuce says, he’s considering driving from Las Vegas, where he lives, to New Jersey, where his parents are, and visiting his friends from Twitch on the way.

“I don’t think I’ll ever leave Twitch. I mean, live-streaming and the community in general,” he says. “The stream will still be a thing, but I think interpersonal communication and hanging out and, you know, giving someone a firm handshake is my end goal.”

LaserGeekCreations has been streaming crafting for longer than Lettuce and Proxy, and he confirms their assessments of the community. “The makers community is such an amazing community. I think you’ve probably heard that from other people already,” he says. “Because it doesn’t matter what you’re making. We’re all makers, we all like seeing what other people are doing. Everyone’s so supportive of each other.”

That kind of supportive community feeling can be invaluable if you’re trying to finish something. As anyone who’s tried to make anything knows, creating things is hard because going from idea to reality requires a number of steps, which sometimes aren’t particularly obvious. On Twitch, the Makers & Crafting community makes it just a little easier.

Miami Heat suspends Meyers Leonard for using slur during Twitch stream

The Miami Heat has suspended Meyers Leonard indefinitely after he used an anti-Semitic slur during a Twitch stream on Monday.

“The Miami Heat vehemently condemns the use of any form of hate speech,” the NBA team wrote in a Twitter statement on Tuesday evening. “The words used by Meyers Leonard were wrong and we will not tolerate hateful language from anyone associated with our franchise.”

In a statement apologizing for his actions posted to Instagram, Leonard says he wasn’t aware of the meaning of the slur when he said it.

“While I didn’t know what the word meant at the time, my ignorance about its history and how offensive it is to the Jewish community is absolutely not an excuse and I was just wrong,” he said. “I am now more aware of its meaning and I am committed to properly seeking out people who can help educate me about this type of hate and how we can fight it.”

The NBA also issued a statement, saying it “unequivocally condemns all forms of hate speech,” a spokesperson told ESPN.

Twitch has suspended Leonard, the company tells The Verge. “We do not allow the use of hateful slurs on Twitch,” Twitch said in a statement. “The safety of our community is our top priority, and per our guidelines we reserve the right to suspend any account for conduct that we determine to be inappropriate, harmful, or puts our community at risk.”

Other organizations have distanced themselves from Leonard as well. Gaming and esports organization FaZe Clan, which Leonard had invested in, said on Tuesday evening that it had severed ties:

And sponsors Origin PC and Scuf Gaming, which are both owned by Corsair, have also said they are ending their working relationships with Leonard.

While stars saying inappropriate things on stream is relatively new territory for NBA players who dabble in streaming, it’s an unfortunately common problem for the biggest names on Twitch. Turner “Tfue” Tenney, for example, was suspended in 2018 for using a racial slur on stream, though the platform did not take action when he said a different slur in 2019. And Fortnite pro Daniel “Dubs” Walsh was banned from Twitch and suspended from FaZe Clan after saying a racial slur in February 2020. (He has since been reinstated.)

Other celebrities who have tried their hand at streaming have faced real-world consequences for hurtful language as well. NASCAR driver Kyle Larson was fired by his team in April for using the n-word during a sim racing stream, while musician Joel Zimmerman, who you might know as deadmau5, deleted his Twitch channel in 2019 after he was suspended for saying homophobic slurs.

Twitch may be adding a ‘brand safety score’ for streamers

Cybersecurity researcher Daylam Tayari has found evidence in Twitch’s internal API that the site plans to implement something called a “brand safety score” for its streamers. That score would depend on a number of criteria: the streamer’s age, a rating given by Twitch staff, their ban history, the relationship the streamer has with Twitch, their automod settings, their partnership status, the ESRB rating of the game being played, and whether the stream is set to mature.

Twitch has added an automatic Brand Safety Score which grades how brand friendly every streamer is based on things like chat behavior, ban history, manual ratings by Twitch staff, games played, age, automod and more (See below).

1/5 pic.twitter.com/VBl4HjGv7t

— Daylam ‘tayari’ Tayari (@tayariCS) March 9, 2021

Twitch a couple days ago added to their GQL (internal) API endpoints (keyword to query the API) for a “brandSafetyScore” which is sent to advertisers for ads, sponsors and also probably for bounty purposes.

Check this tweet’s images for screenshots of the API changes.

2/5 pic.twitter.com/cHUzvnl50s

— Daylam ‘tayari’ Tayari (@tayariCS) March 9, 2021

If Tayari’s research is indeed accurate — and here I should note that I have reached out to Twitch and will update this story if I hear back — this would represent a shift in the way that advertisers interact with streamers on the platform. Presently, one of the main ways that marketers work with streamers on Twitch is the site’s bounty board; select partners and affiliates in the US, UK, Germany, and France can choose from a list of paid opportunities to either play games or watch branded videos with their communities for automatic payouts. It’s a pretty slick system, one that streamlines and automates the (occasionally arduous) process of working with a brand and getting paid for it.

It’s not hard to imagine that if Twitch does in fact implement a brand safety score for streamers that it would be used to expand the bounty program; it seems like a useful thing for brands to be able to compare streamers on that specific axis, at least. Then again, for streamers, it does mean the site is tracking you on yet another metric that may or may not be available for you to see. I can’t help but think about Uber and Lyft ratings, and how quietly insidious they can be: if your rating gets screwed up for whatever reason, you lose your ability to drive — to make money.

Dell G15 Gets Glittery Redesign, RTX 3000 in China

(Image credit: Dell)

Dell is refreshing its 15-inch gaming notebook, the Dell G15, with a new design and refreshed specs. Today’s announcement is for China, where the laptop is available now, and will come to the rest of the world “later,” likely this year.

The company is being surprisingly coy on specs for a laptop that is actually going on sale today, albeit in a single market. What we do know is that Dell will offer three options, going up to 115W of

TDP

and Nvidia’s Ampere (RTX 3000) graphics. No specific processor details were made available. The 15.6-inch display will go up to 360 Hz, which should help in quick twitch esports, and uses low-blue light hardware, meeting German TuV standards.

Image 1 of 2

(Image credit: Dell)

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(Image credit: Dell)

The new G15 has a more aggressive, angular design that comes in four new colorways: dark shadow grey, obsidian black, “spector green with speckles” and “phantom grey with speckles,” which seem to suggest somewhat glittery exteriors. Dell missed an opportunity to call it “specktor green,” but oh well.

With that new design comes an upgraded cooling system, which Dell says came from its higher-end gaming line, Alienware. A four-zone RGB keyboard is optional and uses the same AlienFX software as its Alienware counterparts. Photos show USB Type-A ports, a drop-jaw Ethernet port, headphone jack and an HDMI output.

No prices were immediately announced, and Dell has made no suggestions as to whether the specifications coming to the rest of the world will be the same as the ones in China.

Next-Gen Thunderbolt Could Double Speed of TB4, Intel Says

(Image credit: Shutterstock)

Thunderbolt 4 is just starting to make noise in the consumer space, but, of course, the folks behind the technology are already looking toward the next generation. This week, executives from Intel stopped by The Tom’s Hardware Show to discuss Thunderbolt and what its next form could look like.

While celebrating Thunderbolt’s 10th birthday, Ben Hacker, Intel’s director of I/O strategy in the Client Connectivity Division, explained that the development of Thunderbolt 4’s successor is already in place with sights set on higher speed.

“What I think we’re pretty confident of is for at least another speed bump somewhere, and who knows exactly what that is, but call it roughly a doubling,” Hacker said on The Tom’s Hardware Show.

Thunderbolt 4’s max bandwidth is 40 Gbps, allowing it to support up to two 4K resolution displays at 60 Hz refresh rates or even an 8K one at 60 Hz. Increasing the bandwidth would bring support for even higher resolutions and refresh rates.

Hacker also pointed toward the need for more bandwidth for concurrent workflows, like editing data on a high-resolution screen, and SSDs as drivers for more bandwidth.

“Today our data path bandwidth within Thunderbolt 4 is kind of aligned to like a PCIe Gen 3×4 performance, and for some of our storage applications, you’re seeing storage in that kind of form factor already doubling in speed,” Hacker said.

“There’s already a need for kind of high-performance storage for, maybe, NVMe SSDs or desktop raid arrays that are going to be able to consume more than the 40 gigabits of bandwidth or just under 40 that we can provide today.”

Backward compatibility is also important for the next generation of Thunderbolt. Intel notably shared the Thunderbolt protocol for what is now known as USB4.

“We started first with that connector and cable convergence, and then we have the architectural convergence [with USB4],” Jason Ziller, Intel’s general manager of the Client Connectivity Division, said. “As we move forward, as USB4 evolves, we’ll continue to be converged on those elements of it. But we’ll continue to provide features and capabilities above that or just the optional features in the USB spec that we make required because we know computer users want them.”

The next version of Thunderbolt will presumably be called Thunderbolt 5, but Ziller said they don’t know what the branding moving forward will be yet. Whatever it’s called, Intel expects next-gen Thunderbolt to continue working over USB-C.

“I think we can definitely stay within the electrical kind of communication path and on the same connector so it’s truly a familiar, backward compatible … solution,” Hacker said. “ … At least kind of for the next step, whenever that comes, I think we’re pretty confident that we can keep that on a kind of same mechanical interface, same connector, roughly the same topology.”

Of course, we’re still years away from Thunderbolt 5 (or whatever it ends up being called) striking. In the more immediate future, development is in the works for more Thunderbolt 4 accessories, including docks in different sizes and shapes and docks that don’t require their own power adapter and instead uses a laptop’s USB-C charger.

And for those with the need, Thunderbolt 4 cables up to 50m (164 feet) long should be available around next year.

“We had in [the] previous generation optical cables up to 50m, and so we’re working on delivering that as well now,” Ziller said.

The Tom’s Hardware Show is live every Thursday at 3 p.m. ET. You can enjoy this week’s episode via the video above, on YouTube, Facebook, Twitch or wherever you get your podcasts.