Twitch conducted a test this week and automatically served ads during streams that streamers could not control. This has faced rejection, anger, and outright hatred. Now the experiment is over. Twitch thanks everyone for the feedback.
On Monday, Twitch announced that it would be serving ads during streams as part of a test. Viewers who had not seen ads for a while were to see them then.
During this, the actual stream was minimized and muted while the ads ran.
In practice, it looked like this:
From the beginning, streamers expressed concerns about the idea, and the criticism of it only grew louder in practice.
“The test is over”
This is what Twitch says: After all the furious comments from streamers, who were spewing venom and gall, Twitch is super factual and polite. They treat the impending apocalypse like just another normal Thursday at the office.
It says:
“Thank you for all your feedback. We have concluded the test of ads during streams. Advertising is an important part of keeping Twitch free, and we understand your concerns. We will continue to work on improving the advertising experience and giving streamers more control.”
Twitch
This is what it’s about: Twitch’s statement is apparently a code for the fact that almost no change has faced such universal rejection as the idea of serving ads during streams that the streamer does not control.
In recent days, many convincing arguments against this kind of advertising have been raised:
- Twitch is live – you can’t just interrupt it like a YouTube video. Because people miss content
- This kind of advertising ruins the pace and mood of a stream
- Furthermore, it takes control away from the streamer over their channel
- There are reasons why streamers run very little advertising on Twitch; it simply isn’t financially worthwhile – Twitch now wants to force them to do so with the new feature. That’s not okay.
Twitch has certainly noticed this shitstorm. However, they now only indirectly address it in their response. They almost act as if everything went according to plan and the test was simply concluded as expected.
However, they say: They wanted to give streamers more control. So the message seems to have been received.
Recently, there have been repeated conflicts between Twitch and streamers. As Twitch becomes increasingly commercialized. In the last advertising campaign it was already said that Amazon is only interested in fresh cash when it comes to Twitch.
The arguments from streamers against this type of advertising are diverse and colorful. We have summarized the most important arguments in an article when the ads were actually running in practice, which ruined a stream for the current PS5 reveal:
1.8 million watch PS5 event on Twitch – But new forced ads are really annoying.
