GAMES: Twitch charges $100 to pin chatbox messages for 2.5 minutes

Twitch is test­ing a new fea­ture that offers a reli­able way for view­ers to see chat­box mes­sages from their favorite stream­ers (and their buddies).

The live-stream­ing plat­form offers an exper­i­men­tal fea­ture on some chan­nels called “Pro­mot­ed Chat,” which allows view­ers to pay to view their messages.

Like YouTube’s Super Chat, the more your view­ers pay, the longer your mes­sage will be featured.

If you pay $5, you can sub­li­mate the mes­sage for 30 sec­onds, and if you pay $10, you can sub­li­mate the mes­sage for 1 minute. $25 for a minute and a half, two min­utes? It’s $50.

And if you want your mes­sage to dis­play for two and a half min­utes, be pre­pared to pay $100.

$100 for Super Chat on YouTube is usu­al­ly enough to high­light your mes­sage for an hour.

In oth­er words, although the func­tion­al­i­ty is sim­i­lar, the imple­men­ta­tion is not exact­ly the same. YouTube adds a book­mark at the top of each Super­chat chat­box that view­ers can click to go to the donor’s message.

Mean­while, Twitch is test­ing two poten­tial chat loca­tions under the over­pass. Select­ed stream­ers will see fea­tured mes­sages at the top of their chat­box or at the bot­tom of their videos.

Also, Twitch says on the fea­ture’s sup­port page that view­ers will be queued if mul­ti­ple peo­ple pay for the over­pass chat at the same time, so it appears that only one fea­tured mes­sage can be cre­at­ed at a time.

Of course, $100 for two and a half min­utes of vis­i­bil­i­ty sounds pret­ty exor­bi­tant. Espe­cial­ly when you can pay $25 for five 30-sec­ond uplift­ing messages.

The exper­i­ment will run for four weeks, after which Twitch will ana­lyze the test data and decide whether to expand this feature.