Hello Beauteaful Cuteas, I am AnnaLemontea and I am a polyglot artist and musician from Italy who spends a lot of time online! If you are not familiar with what I do, you can usually find me on Twitch or Discord, but I’m working towards being more present on YouTube and Instagram to expand my lovely community, because I realise not many spaces online are safe for people who are neurodivergent and lgbtq+, like me, so it’s very personal and very important for me to maintain these spaces active and cosy for all the people who pass by and want to stay a while. So grab a cup of tea, or your drink of choice, take a sip and settle down for a moment, while I explain the title of this video.

Am I leaving Twitch? Yes, and no. I’m going to keep streaming, but after many many months of thinking, I took the decision to demonetise my twitch channel by the end of 2024, so in a way I’m leaving Twitch, even if I’m staying, does that make sense? There are many reasons why I decided to do this, so I’ll explain them now, but if you’re more interested about the practical implications of what this means, you can jump to 8:03, where I explain what will happen from now.

The main reason I don’t want to be a Twitch affiliate anymore is that Twitch’s grip has been feeling suffocating in the last couple of years, and I think you guys noticed it. I definitely have not been at my best, and I have struggled a lot, and I apologise for every single time I have lost sight of the reason why I’m here, and why you’re here, which is to have that safe space, where you can relax for a while and recharge, before setting off to the real world and be the best version of yourself you can be! Even if that means resting for a while and not being too hard on yourself for not doing all the things you wanted to do. So, between other things, I want to get away from the “grind” mindset that Twitch wants to normalise, because realistically it’s basically impossible to be successful unless you stream many hours every day… I remember I started feeling very uneasy about this realisation when I started streaming back in 2020, and also later when I attended twitch con and I attended a panel about mental health and streaming, where there were some twitch partners who talked about their struggles with overworking and they warned us, don’t do it like us! Even tho, they said, we would have never been successful if we hadn’t done that. This is just very sad. Overworking to achieve “success” is not what I want to do, I love streaming and connecting with people online, but I don’t live for streaming, I have so many things I want to do outside of it, so many projects that I’m working on in my private life which will never be related to streaming, and that’s ok! As humans, we are multifaceted, so I want to show that, and I won’t play the social media game where to be able to grow you can only do 1 thing, all the time. It’s ok not to grow. It’s ok to have a small community of quality people, who really are there because they feel like they belong. I’m sorry it took so long to say these words out loud. I feel like it’s a brainwashing thing somehow, that social media does to us but I’m out of it now.

Speaking of more practical reasons, I’m also demonetising twitch to remove ads from my channel. It’s so crazy to me that as an Affiliate you can’t turn off ads, even if the ad revenue is literally a few cents a month. I don’t know about you, but every time I enter a stream and an ad starts immediately, I really struggle not to close the tab immediately. This gets very technical, but the only way for streamers to remove the ad when you open the stream is to play 3m of ads every hour. Now I don’t know if you’ve ever sat behind a 3m ad wall but it sucks and the only reasonable reaction is to close Twitch. I don’t even feel like I want to give them money to make the ads stop at that point, it just makes me angry, and I don’t want people to feel like that when they come to my stream.

Another reason that you probably should know is that Twitch’s cut when you pay money for a subscription to me is 50%. Yep, you pay 6 dollars to my stream, 3 dollars go to Twitch. I get 3 dollars - taxes that twitch removes before my payouts and - the taxes I have to pay to the Italian government on my payouts, soooo I haven’t calculated it but the final amount is pretty ridiculous. Is it fair to you? Is it fair to me? I don’t think so.

Keeping the topic on money, I’m sure you agree with me that the latest choices that Twitch made as a company are pretty debatable at best, for example this year’s Subtember is a clear indication that Twitch seems to want to reward new subs instead of long-time supporters, which doesn’t work with my values and my feelings towards my community.

Alright, now that I’ve gotten that out of way I feel so much better! And I’m so excited because it’s time to talk about my plans about what will change after the demonetisation. I’ve thought about this for so long, it’s crazy we are actually doing it. I feel so free!

Alright, main question everybody is thinking about… I’m subbed to Twitch tho! What happens to my sub?? Well, I feel so blessed because I actually know exactly what is going to happen, thanks to my friend Khalil who did it earlier this year and was so kind to explain the details to to me. So, when I demonetise, if you’re subbed, your subscription should expire automatically at the end of the subscription time, but I recommend just in case you end it manually before that. In any case you will keep your sub privileges like emotes until the end of your subscription nonetheless.

When I demonetise, many things will disappear, like sub badges, but VIP badges will stay! So I decided to award an honorary VIP badge to all the people who have been subscribed for 1 year or more, you will keep this VIP badge forever in my channel and in my Discord server! This will give you access to Discord exclusive events and voice channels even if you’re not actively subbed. I’m keeping an updated list of all the people who supported me through the years, so don’t worry, your help is not being forgotten and I am going to give back as much as I can <3

Now I need to be real with you for a second, of course I love doing all the things I do online and it fills me with joy to connect with all of you every day, but being this present takes a lot of energy and time. Plus, at the moment I’m trying to save money because my partner is moving to Italy as soon as next year and we are going to live together, with all the costs that that comes with. All this to say, I couldn’t just demonetise my Twitch channel and keep investing so much time into this, as you can understand, I’m sure. So I came up with an actually crazy idea to make my own website for you to support me and the work I do for the community and the content, a way for me to be directly connected with my supporters, and have my own space with my own rules and my own personality. Sooo, introducing Lemontea Emporium!! If you’re an og bish you will remember it was Lemontea Empire before, but I changed it for a very specific reason: as I said many times, it’s my big dream to have a café that is also a shop that is also a coworking space. Now, in the real world, you need money to do that, money I don’t have. But online, I can do whatever I want for little cost! So I made my café online, and I went all in with the fantasy, bear with me. The graphics will improve with time, it’s only sketches for now, but I wanted you to see my vision: alright, it’s a floating spaceship Emporium, because it’s a safe space, you get it? And inside of the Emporium you can stop by while you drink something, shop around with witchy things and even play games?? I know right? ok, so, as I said this Emporium is renovating at the moment, there is a lot of work to be done, but you can finance the renovation becoming a supporter, or an investor or even a shareholder! Because this is my Emporium and my rules, there are many benefits of being one of these, for example free gifts and discounts?? but also early access to my new music and involvement in decisions about my Emporium and content I publish online! You’ll be also able to download an App of my website on your phone, so you can keep up with things, if Discord is too much for you <3 You can find all the perks on my website annalemontea.com, I made the prices slightly cheaper than Twitch, I believe, but it depends on the country you’re from. If you support me there, you also get an automatic discord role to be able to join all the voice channels there, you just have to connect your Discord to the website, like you did for twitch <3 So yeah! If you want to subscribe already, there is a supporter-only small gift there for you, and something new is coming next week! Stay tuuuned :)

But here is a very important question: what if you are still subscribed on Twitch and you don’t want to pay twice?? You don’t have to, don’t pay twice, just message me with a screenshot of when your subscription will end and I will give you a special code or link to get the same exact things as Lemontea supporters do <3 There’s gonna be an adjustment period so let’s just communicate, if you feel like anything is unfair and should be changed, please let me know! Thank you so much for bearing with me and this big change!

Finally, going back to twitch for a second, here are some other things that will change in random order:

• as I said, subs and bits will disappear
• channel points redeems like “I’m first” will disappear, but I’m setting up my soundboard so that you can redeem sounds instead for this kind of things, like we’re using “a megapint” right now. It’s gonna be free to use for everybody and you will find it in my panel section under the stream. This means that you should use all your channel points this month!! Redeem away my dudes!
• emotes will sadly disappear, except the follower emotes (only available in my channel), but we will make them available through 7TV, so ideally you can also ask your favourite other streamers to add them to their stream for free! Of course they will also be on discord! We will upload a still version and an animated version so that you can use them if you don’t have Discord Nitro
• Twitch predictions and polls will disappear, but I will add a poll overlay when needed, the type that you just need to send a 1 or 2 in the chat to vote. Easy

Finally I want to thank my best friend Korea and my partner Axo for being on my side through the struggle, the tears, the self-doubt, and for helping me believe that I matter, every day.

Thanks also to TG_Khalil for help with technical things and moral support through it all.

And thanks to everybody who supported me on twitch until now: [list]

There is so much more to be said and to be revealed but it’s not that time yet!