Twitch Revives Pog Picks for This Year’s Holiday Season

Twitch Revives Pog Picks for This Year’s Holiday Season

Published: November 22, 2022

Twitch is resurrecting its livestream shopping event, Pog Picks, for this year’s holiday season which will see separate activations in the U.S., Canada, U.K. and Germany.

Pog Picks showcases a collection of products that are a mix of editorial picks and brand sponsorship deals. Twitch’s Brand Partnership Studio produces the event, then hands it down to streamers who actually host the entire thing. Twitch streamers invite viewers to participate in various gaming challenges, polls and other types of interactive content for a chance to win Pog Picks products.

The US audience will be able to participate in the “Pog Picks: Holiday Hive” on December 10 beginning at 9 p.m. ET. Shoppers from the U.K. and Germany can win featured products on November 25 in a Black Friday themed shopping event.

This year, Pog Picks has seen several successful activations outside the holiday season — first, around Amazon Prime Day, and then for back-to-school season. Canadian viewers also celebrated the “Pog Picks: MultEHverse” event which offered new technology deals and pulled in nearly 70,000 unique viewers on streamer bobajenny’s Twitch channel. The three hour-long stream featured products from Samsung, Chromebook, Doritos, etc.

The return of the Pog Picks event comes at a time when many brands are pulling out of the livestream shopping niche, citing users’ preference for short-term content rather than watching streams that can run for hours on end. While it’s true that ByteDance-owned TikTok has taken the world by storm, live streams have a steady viewership that’s expected to grow from 158.2 million in 2022 to 164.6 million by 2024 in the US alone.

Even Meta-owned Facebook and Alphabet’s YouTube announced their decisions to focus on shorter formats, which YouTube desperately tried to run away from in the past, only to realize it was a mistake. However, hour-long videos and live streams are two entirely different things.

For Twitch, there’s no question about it. The streaming giant has almost tripled its sponsorship revenue due to the advertising knowledge stemming from its eCommerce parent, combined with the streamer’s experience with what the viewers are looking for.

“We’ve seen tremendous growth from our Pog Picks productions, and are continuing to experiment with new formats to make them more entertaining and interactive,” said Adam Harris, global head of Twitch’s Brand Partnership Studio.

Long-form or short-form, viewers stand to benefit from events such as Pog Picks, and so does the platform, and the brands advertising on it.

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