Following the reveal of its VIP Program in September, Periscope announced that it changed the requirements users must meet before being eligible for the program.
The Periscope VIP Program gives eligible broadcasters access to a variety of benefits, including badges on their Periscope profiles and “prioritization in people search results.” When the VIP Program was announced, Periscope said it would require users to have at least 10,000 followers on Periscope in order to quality for Bronze, the lowest tier of the program.
Now, Periscope removed the follower requirements from the program, and it has placed the focus on the average number of live viewers users have for each broadcast.
In a blog post, Periscope commented:
Many of you shared with us that “number of followers” is not always the best indication of live content, and we agree. During the past few weeks, we've had multiple conversations on the program requirements and what we can do to better reflect what's most important to our community. We believe that average live viewers per broadcasts meet that requirement. The live interactions and audiences you've brought together on Periscope are at the heart of what we do, and we will be focusing on those metrics to review applications. Follower count has been totally removed from the requirements.
As part of this update, Periscope increased the average number of live viewers users need to have for each broadcast to be eligible for the Silver and Gold tiers of the VIP Program.
Specifically, while users were previously required to have an average of 300 live viewers per broadcast to be eligible for the Silver tier (in addition to the follower requirement), the Silver tier now requires users to have an average of 750 live viewers per broadcast. In addition, while the Gold tier previously required users to have an average of 500 live viewers per broadcast, this number has been increased to 2,000.
The live viewer requirement for the Bronze tier (an average of 200 live viewers per broadcast) hasn't been changed.
In addition, the program still requires users to broadcast, on average, two times per week to be eligible for any of the three tiers.
Periscope continued:
With the focus on live viewership, more than one-third of broadcasters who apply to the program are accepted, and the majority of people who don't qualify are extremely close. This excites us because it revalidates that these new requirements are a better representation of what should qualify a broadcaster for the VIP program. We will review the new and existing applications on a biweekly basis.
Readers: What do you think about this change to the Periscope VIP Program?
