The life of a professional Twitch streamer doesn't just revolve around playing games and persuading chat to subscribe using Twitch Prime. Once a streamer builds their audience large enough, there's a complicated system of business sponsorships to juggle as well. Sponsorship deals are largely dealt with behind the scenes, visible only through a "#ad" tag in a Twitch stream's title. But sometimes Twitch streamers open up more about the process. Such is the case for Jericho, who recently botched a major sponsorship event.
The start of the clip from Jericho's Twitch stream has him looking at the official Twitch website, which had a professional photo of him. He mentions the photo was planned to be used for billboards, but that the plan's likely changed. Jericho is at first unwilling to talk about the issue, but is visibly upset. His chat eventually talks him into it, and Jericho explains that his relationship with Twitch is now extremely poor due to a botched sponsorship stream with McDonald's.
During this sponsored stream by McDonald's, Jericho explains how he made several mistakes that are unconscionable for a streamer to do. For example, Jericho repeatedly referred to a set of "Whopper Coins" he received for McDonald's 50th Anniversary, which he could redeem for free Whoppers. Whoppers being the iconic hamburger of McDonald's competitor Burger King. He followed that up by referring to a Super Smash Bros. Ultimate skin for Falco as "Red Robin," going so far as to sing the Red Robin jingle as he said the name.
Twitch, he says, was extremely unhappy, to put it lightly. This was apparently McDonald's first contract with Twitch and to say McDonald's won't be moving forward with it is an understatement. According to Jericho, Twitch is so unhappy with his actions that it has all-but-canceled his partnership, removing all sponsorship options, integrated ads, and so on. Jericho explains that it's lost him half his income, but also speaks candidly about how he takes full responsibility for his own mistakes.
Jericho's transparency regarding his ongoing issues at Twittch and how sponsorships work is a boon to the Twitch community. Fans can see how the inner workings of sponsorship work for their favorite Twitch streamers. Other Twitch streamers can see how best to compose themselves when taking on a sponsorship themselves. And Twitch itself has hopefully learned that they need to better support and inform Twitch streamers about sponsorship requirements, especially with such high-profile deals on the line.