Thread by @TheMilliebug

Hoo boy, I didn’t think I was going to make this thread, but:

My name is Millie and I work in a tech team that puts ads on our company’s website.

Or I did, until the bottom fell out of ads due to COVID.

With @Twitch introducing mid-rolls, here are some things you should know:

(Also at the end I’ve written a short list of alternative ad solutions, please feel free to add to them)

Advertising is THE MAIN FORM of revenue generation on the internet. It’s what pays for the internet to run. It’s how Google makes its money. Facebook makes a lot from ads too.

But ads has taken a hit because of COVID, companies are less likely to advertise right now.

#Twitch costs SO MUCH to run. It isn’t free to host thousands of people’s content.

To the extent that it’s highly likely that they aren’t that profitable.

‘But bits and subs!’ I hear you cry - yes, they make money through those, but most viewers on twitch, don’t sub to anyone.

Why is this years Subtember for new subscribers? Because that’s their biggest potential group for new revenue.

If you’ve T3’d to someone, you’re gonna continue regardless of discount, so why should they give you one?

That’s literally giving away money.

I’m not defending Twitch, but they are a BUSINESS. And streaming is a TINY business at that. Daddy Amazon isn’t going to ‘save’ Twitch if it gets into trouble. If Daddy Amazon thinks Twitch is costing them too much money, they will cut Twitch.

Goodbye Prime.

Goodbye Twitch.

My point is, ads suck. And yes, Twitch hasn’t worked out exactly how ads fit into their platform. But when I see people tweeting “use an adblocker when you come to my stream!”

You’re literally sabotaging the company that is providing you with your platform.

I reckon Twitch gets around $4-7 per thousand views on an ad. That’s not a lot. They might get more for some campaigns, but it’s not a lot.

Your choice is likely to be: have ads on Twitch, or don’t have Twitch at all. At that point, what would you rather?

Twitch also doesn’t have the information needed for a lot of ad campaigns. If L’Oréal come to twitch and say “we want to purchase 2 million ads to be shown to women between the ages of 24-35” Twitch needs to be able to say “yes, we can do that”

But right now, they can’t.

That’s thousands of dollars already lost, and so much machine learning is needed to be able to predict the patterns of men and women of different ages on Twitch without raw data on them. Do Twitch have the resources for this?

It’s also likely to be why the ad pool is so small.

Lots of people say that if #Youtube decided to put money into streaming, it would instantly outplay Twitch.

And while I know they are planning to, why do you think they haven’t already?

Because youtube doesn’t think it’s worth the money.

Which is telling.

However, I don’t want mid-rolls either.

So what can we do about it?

Suggest alternative ideas is the first thing:

- use the space AROUND the stream for banner ads.
- a slot on the front page for video ads.

- a video player in the bottom corner which plays popular streamer clips with ads sandwiched between (or during if they’re longer than X seconds) then while the user hasn’t clicked on a stream
- give users an option to voluntarily watch ads in exchange for ad-free viewing (cont.)

So every time chat watches 5-10 ads between them, everyone in the stream gets ad free viewing for 15 minutes
- have a premium plan on top of subs: pay $9.99 a month to Twitch for no ads site-wide
- tell Twitch you’re unhappy through the proper channels - there’s a forum post

Which literally has ONLY 3.5k votes. Share it with your friends, and PROVIDE TWITCH WITH OPTIONS. They don’t care if you decide to go elsewhere, they’re more concerned with keeping the site running.

So vote: twitch.uservoice.com/forums/310237-…

The aim of a business is to make as much money as possible. We should be trying to help them make money so we can continue streaming.

There are thousands of us, surely we can be more productive than angry ranting at the poor @Twitch and @TwitchSupport account managers?

/thread

For those of you interested, I did some reading and some digging on the situation:

https://twitter.com/TheMilliebug/status/1306721972643082240?s=20