Yes, you won't lose your slot. Your slot is active for a full 8 hours so you could stream 1 hour, take an hour long break, go live for 2 more, take another hour break and then go live for 3 hours and you'd be on the frontpage for all 3 of those streams as long as they fell within your window.
You're allowed to collab on the front page, including via Stream Together! Just make sure that anyone you're streaming with is aware of the frontpage guidelines.
You can! Mature games are fine, just make sure it's not on the banned list of games :)
There's no set time. Watch for the frontpage channel to announce they’ve closed submissions. Emails go out by the end of that month, and come solely from frontpagepromotion@twitch.tv (make sure to check spam/junk)!
Note - This system is currently not working as intended, you are supposed to get an email confirmation when you apply, and one for you being rejected or accepted on each application. It's well documented this doesn't happen currently, many users have reported not receiving rejection emails, or even acceptance emails and missing their slot entirely (myself included). Twitch is aware, all we can do is hope they fix it.
Twitch doesn't want you going to a brand and saying, "Hey, I'm going to be on the Front Page on so-and-so-date, do you want to give me $500 to promote you during it?" Basically, you can't use it to sell ads.
You can continue to promote your existing brand partners. You can tell people about your merch or Etsy store. You can tell people how they can hire/commission you.
No, once accepted, that slot’s what you get regardless of whether you go live during it.
Sadly yes. Twitch has confirmed via their own FAQ that if you change your username, you will lose that slot as they cannot transfer it over.
If you change your username before being selected, you can re-submit your application and include your new name without penalty.
You should get a notification on your twitch dashboard that looks like this.
There are some things you can do in order to increase your chances of getting selected, as data from Twitch themselves via heatmaps have shown that slots away from peak times and towards the end of the month are much less contested. That being said, it's ultimately a lottery. Remember that you are applying alongside thousands of other applicants, and there's only so many slots to go around. We have no information from Twitch regarding reasons for rejection, it's all internal (I have raised this as feedback with them as reasoning would be a good step in communication imo).
It's important to note that you being rejected doesn't mean that your content isn't good enough, or that the event you planned isn't important enough. You likely just didn't get lucky, and ultimately the boost from front page does almost nothing long term statistically anyway. It is extremely difficult to convert those front page lurkers into active viewers for you, so it's very unlikely to make or break any particular stream.
- Make sure none of the Content Classification labels are checked (besides mature-rated game, that one is automatic and won't affect anything)
- Have a category active, if you have NO category active, you can’t be featured.