18-35 year old men is a demographic that is extremely valuable to advertisers. Unfortunately, it also seems to be quite a slippery bunch who shy away from most forms of advertising. They definitely love Steam sales though!
And i suspect a reason for the entire debacle is that a lot of the user base weren't seeing ads at all due to ad-blockers or the use of 3rd party apps.
It's a problem that also seems to plague twitch in that they simply aren't generating the revenue that's expected from the amount of traffic generated.
Neither of which would be a problem for them if they didn’t remake and destroy the default UX on their desktop and made a functional app.
By pushing users to third party solutions they also pushed them off of the ads. Because if you want a web extension to redirect to “old.reddit.com”, why not throw an adblocker on top?
Oh but that isn't interesting.
Plus with marriage on the decline, they are more free to spend their own money.
> They definitely love Steam sales though!
Steam does not dictate what socio-political views should be.