TwitchAdSolutions – Blocking Twitch Ads | Hacker News Reader

TwitchAdSolutions – Blocking Twitch Ads

github.com

114 points11001100113 comments

I hate how Twitch puts over a minute of pre-roll ads before you can start watching a stream. They should at least wait 60 seconds, I can't imagine how many people have chosen not to catch a new stream because they'd immediately have to sit through over a minute of ads before even getting to any content.

This is up to the streamer.

Either ~3 minutes of ads per hour, or an up-front 30s of ads before you can view the stream.

You would only see >1 minute of ads if they choose the first option and you hit the stream on the ad break.

But I agree with you. I've bounced from many-a-stream due to up-front ads.

I exclusively check out new twitch channels upon getting recommendations or learning from the channel via something like YT, purely due to the ads.

Streamers (like myself) can entirely not opt into affiliate and have zero ads for their viewers.

I heard from another big streamer that you doesn't get as advertised if you decide to do that sadly

This definitely kills the low-intent watcher. Twitch sends me daily emails to hop on and watch streamers that I follow. Every once in awhile, I'm not busy so I click the link, "Sure I'll watch that person write OCaml...". And 30 seconds in, I'm almost ALWAYS, "nah... I'm not into sitting here this long, I didn't even intend to be here".

If they could let someone watch like 3 to 5 minutes, they could likely increase engagement.

You'd think or hope they'd be tracking, A/B testing to see how this goes - and I wonder if incentives are perfectly aligned between Twitch's profits-costs and of the streamers they have to share ad revenues with?

The tracking is presumably extensive, but I would guess that the metrics are wrong. I would assume that Twich is optimizing for ad revenue, not engagement, entertainment, or utility.

It's a pretty classic case of a startup sacrificing profit for growth until they reach critical mass and move to maximizing profit. Twitch probably decided they were as big as they were going to get and are no longer focused on user growth.

It might also give worse insights on how you interpret the data. I'd imagine that those with huge followers/events will have most people grit through the ads. I myself do this when watching esports tournaments. I don't mind the pre-roll because I'll be there for 30+ minutes.

But as you and the other poster mentioned, that wouldn't necessarily be true for smaller streamers. In fact I share the sentiments posted elsewhere; where if you want to check out a smaller channel but don't want to waste 1.5 mins in ads. I'll just immediately bounce.

It's a doom cycle were those with popularity will always out compete smaller streamers. Smaller streamers get cannibalized by site's practices.

The only thing missing is a competitor but as we see from past competitor's streamers/viewers seem to be a very fickle bunch. They like the platform not the streamers, but the platform is now hostile.

If you do A/B testing you should be trying to control as many variables as possible.

It makes sense for twitch, given its skewed distribution, to compare the behaviour of users engaging with the different types of streamers.

Under this logic, I presume they might actually see that engagement is not substantially harmed for big time streamers while getting actually millions of views on their ads as opposed to engagement harmed for low viewership streamers who don't really give the platform much money anyway.

I think it's a flaw in your thinking to assume twitch might have the interests of small streamers in mind. They probably don't. Once a big streamer retires, another takes their place. The viewership remains.

I think this is configurable on the streamer's end. I watch a lot of PirateSoftware and he's talked about how choosing to run ads at certain intervals vs running them before the stream starts affected his viewership levels. I don't immediately have a video of him saying that, but I imagine there's a YouTube short where he describes that.

All things considered though, I think you are right that the option that forces it at the beginning of the stream is obnoxious and affects the interest of those intending to stream. There's likely a better way (similar to your suggestion) that gets people involved in the stream first.

I think that might depend somewhat on what the stream is. For instance I watch quite a bit of Zelda Ocarina of Time Randomizer race restreams on Twitch. For those it is much much better to have some up-front ads when I join the stream, which is almost always during the "stream starts in 15 minutes" countdown, rather than to have ads appear mid-race. I don't know how much control the streamer has over this kind of thing, though.

> I don't know how much control the streamer has over this kind of thing, though.

Quite a bit. As long as the streamer is running 3 minutes of ads per hour there will not be prerolls. Ad breaks can be run manually or on a configurable schedule, and scheduled ad breaks can be snoozed for 5 minutes (up to 3 times I think) if they arrive at a bad time.

You can't stack preroll free-time for more than an hour though, so you don't get 5 hours without prerolls by running 15 minutes of ads at once.

Mmm. I think for the channels I watch for these races they pick the "preroll" option and are right to do so, because 3 mins of ads an hour would be pretty obnoxious in a 2.5h race. (For the random-settings races which can go 4 or 6 hours if the randomizer picks silly settings, there are scheduled breaks every 2 hours, which provides a point to run ads. But normal races run right through without breaks.)

I watch mostly through the Android cast-to-Chromecast client though, which might be a bit of a special case -- until very recently it didn't show ads at all, which was presumably a silly oversight on Twitch's part...

I am not sure how people are not making the connection but this is directly tied to the economy and interest rates. Unprofitable platforms or barely profitable had relied on advertising before interest rates go up. Advertisers are increasing their costs and platforms can only insert more ads anywhere they can. Roku anyone?

The key point is platforms are fully aware of what they are doing and understand that this will drive users away but that is the point. If you can't fire enough people, sell enough ads or reduce enough product maintenance in your business then the next step is to fire your end users.

"Doing this will drive away viewers, decreasing what we can charge for ads, so lets do it" is not something anyone in any board room of a company selling ads has ever said. "Firing your end users" has the tricky side effects of destroying your revenue.

Like super profitable businesses stopped squeezing for more money? Every shit business person will try to get a promotion and buy a new expensive car and yacht and the only way to do that is make even more profit, so most of the time the quality of the product or service goes down.

There might be a correlation with the economy, where they need to triple down on the enshitification but it could be cultural, "the other managers did this shit and they bought soem cool sports car, I am better then them I will buy 2 cars"

The worst about preroll is they often fail and run 2-3 times in a row before registering you saw them. Can confirm I just stopped searching new streamers due to that. Even the one that aren't supposed to have preroll because they run ads still tend have some somehow, I guess twitch force them anyway or it's just bugged.

This gets doubly bad when I go to watch a streamer I haven't seen in a while, I start getting ads, then I have to log in. Put in my creds, get my phone, find the MFA app, find the Twitch in the list, see the code expires in a few seconds, wait while it flashes red at me, see the new code, enter the new code, get logged in - and the ad restarts since I'm logged in now and page refreshes.

As comes up whenever the "waiting for a new code" issue is discussed, you can enter that "old" code for usually up to 30 seconds. You don't need to wait.

I always forget which services this works for and which ones it doesn't :)

This feature of TOTP auth is universal afaik.

Nope. They need to implement it server-side.

There is some pretty surprising service that doesn't support this, the moment it disappears from your phone the code is no longer valid. It might be Microsoft if you're not using MS's auth app? Like I said I forget which one it is so I always just wait if I'm <5 seconds from expiry, but it is big enough that I was very surprised when it happened.

If you set it up this way. An admin can choose not to or could allow e. g. 8 previous codes. That would allow four and a half minutes to put in any code of this timespan.

might as well try it while you're waiting, yeah? if you get in, you're done. if not, you were just going to wait anyways.

Yeah I agree. I think twitch does too since as a streamer you have the ability disable pre roll ads for your stream by running an ad (it will disable pre roll for a set amount of time).

It seems like they’re using it to incentivize streamers to run more ads so they’ll get better retention by turning off pre roll.

I regularly do this. If I go to watch a stream and I get an unskippable ad, I just leave the site entirely. Would rather watch other content.

> I can't imagine how many people have chosen not to catch a new stream because they'd immediately have to sit through over a minute of ads before even getting to any content.

I've actually stopped trying to look for new streamers to watch because of it.

I've resorted to watching Twitch on YouTube (just watch yesterday's streams after they've been uploaded).

Along with the pre-roll ad system that also causes me to nope out of a stream, their ad system just seems fairly buggy in general. I will constantly be hit with a long ad break into a stream, just for the stream to come back and another ad break rolls again. It's frustrating and I find myself on Twitch less and less. Definitely less inclined to pay for Turbo.

I don't typically mind the ads for streamers who run them between games or set aside an ad break. However if a streamer doesn't manually run the ads live streams never really have a good spot for them to automatically run. Such a double edged sword.

I've completely abandoned Twitch in part for this reason. I imagine they've lost a lot of viewers due to this but it seems like it's still far more profitable for them. A shame really.

As a viewer I disagree, I would much rather sit and wait 60 seconds in the beginning than to start watching something just for my stream to randomly be stopped for an ad.

Since it's live, it isn't like the video will just pick back up where you were. I realize ads could still play during, but if we could make it only in the beginning (or the streamer could say, I am taking a break and trigger an ad, that would be better.

streamers, at least ones who are affiliate, do that. They often time their own breaks with ad breaks so that viewers don't miss content.

if you have someone you WANT to watch, 60s isn't a big deal at the beginning. If you're a new viewer and the first thing you see when you visit a stream is 60s for ads, when you don't even know if you'd like the streamer, your bounce rate is going to be very high. It really limits discoverability.

Also they don’t have a player that can move between live and VOD like YouTube’s. If it were easier to jump back to before the ad and play at 1.25 until you catch up it’d probably be less annoying to the users.

This is a big reason that I will watch a stream on Youtube if a streamer simulcasts on both. The Youtube player is just such a better experience than Twitch's and I already pay for Youtube premium so I can also avoid ads.

research shows most, they do it to manipulate streamers into constantly running ads for everyone.

It's incredible how much effort Twitch puts into bypassing adblockers, compared to how little effort they put into actually selling ad space. At any given time they have maybe 2 or 3 different ads in rotation, and they often resort to running ads for other Amazon services because they don't have enough real ad sales to fill the ad breaks.

There was a months-long period where 95% of the ads I saw were one of two different Audible ads, endlessly repeating, and those were a case of Amazon buying ads from itself since apparently nobody else was buying.

And those ads usually are for stuff that isn't even relevant to me at all.

Like some more AAA garbage and such.

Yeah, their variety of ads is so small that I can't imagine they do much if any targeting at all.

You're right, but isn't that mostly because twitch is 90% gamers?

I mean sure if you had 100 streamers playing chess it might make sense to have a dedicated ad sales team doing targeted ads for chess fans. But if you've got like 4 chess streamers at any given time? Easier to just give them ads for gamers.

> It's incredible how much effort Twitch puts into bypassing adblockers

The type of user they have is more likely to use adblockers than, let's say, most YouTube users. That's probably why.

I work in advertising - Twitch ads are obscenely expensive relative to other online video ads. Their USP is, supposedly, the high view-through-rate and a hard to reach demographic with disposable income. That being said, I worked with an ISP trying to target gamers, it was 4x cheaper just to target gamers on YouTube than to run ads on Twitch.

Amazon is starting to get more serious about selling ads though (Prime Video ads), but Google/Meta have had such a headstart I don't think they will catch up.

My assumption is that the demographic is hard to reach because they are mostly fluent in ad-blocking.

Perhaps companies could reach this demo by investing their ad budget into having a better product that the hard to reach potential customers will recommend to each other.

Someone come up with a catchy name for this and write a LinkedIn post.

If you can come up with a way to monetize a "free" video platform without ads, you could sell the idea alone for billions.

There is surely some point of diminishing returns but the reason you see ads over and over, especially on podcasts, is that advertisers have found that people dont respond to an ad the first or 5th or 10th time you hear it. It's the xnth time you've heard it that you think huh maybe I could to do some manscaping.

Around the hundredth time I heard that kid say "Have you heard the one about the immortal lord of dreams?" I was ready to never subscribe to Audible purely out of spite.

I really think this an under-appreciated or perhaps under-researched phenomenon that is becoming more and more prevalent. It isn't just that ads are everywhere at all times (though that is also awful for a buffet of reasons) but it's the same fucking ads, likely because I am being targeted by a set of them that I'm "likely to respond to" which I then prove wrong every single day. But hot shit, I have heard the fucking insipid jingle for Chumba Casino so many goddamn times that even if, for whatever insane fucking reason, I decided I wanted to gamble online, I wouldn't use their goddamn website with a gun to my head.

And I could say the exact same things for tons of ads I get on the regular. At least most podcast ads are just the host reading a blurb and that's generally fine, I don't engage with it but it isn't grating. Jingles are fucking grating. Idiotic "funny" skits are grating. I definitely find myself remembering these ads more than the other ones, but it's really not in the way I suspect the advertiser was hoping.

> But hot shit, I have heard the fucking insipid jingle for Chumba Casino so many goddamn times

Yeah, casinos are probably the worst intersection between irritating ads and having enormous budgets to make sure you see them a million times. Here it's this fucking guy on Twitch all the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3CKkQkON8A

From the YouTube comments you can see the campaign has really captured the heart of the nation, one fan wrote "if everyone involved with this advert, both on and offscreen, was put up against a wall and shot would it be murder? really?"

Honestly I think our society as a whole would leap forward 200 years if we just sent all the marketers to the moon, but I'm biased. I find all sales people generally irritating for similar reasons. It seems like you just have to lack a certain amount of humanity to take on that job.

Kinda related, Twitter advertising has also absolutely cratered too. I consistently get ads for weight loss drugs and the fucking Liver King of all people. I have no idea what their ad algo has decided about me but it is incredibly, irrevocably wrong.

It's incredible how many Twitch viewers don't even know that Twitch Turbo exists, and that Twitch itself has done an terrible job of promoting it.

Twitch is impossible to watch with ads.

I got ad-free Twitch years ago with Twitch Prime. And then they added ads back in for Prime users. How long will it be until they start adding ads back in for Turbo users?

Twitch Turbo only has two tangible selling points AFAIK:

1. No ads 2. 90 days to store recordings of your live streams instead of 30 days.

I think if you take out that first selling point no one would buy it.

My theory is that they would rather get more individual streamer subs for $5 and the streams do all the advertising for these for them as a plus.

Why don't people just pay the $10/month if you consume enough for ads to annoy you?

I really don't get the extreme amount of effort people put into adblocking for services that have a paid alternative. People have this expectation of all these internet services being free which is wild to me. It costs an enormous amount of bandwidth to run Twitch.

It is still not profitable because it's such a hard business model to run and yet people think they shouldn't have to pay anything for it, even when they use the service for dozens to hundreds of hours a month.

> Why don't people just pay the $10/month if you consume enough for ads to annoy you?

Avid twitch users are generally already spending considerably more than $10 a month with subscriptions to multiple streamers, gifted subscriptions, bits, etc.

> Why don't people just pay the $10/month if you consume enough for ads to annoy you?

No such option exists

https://www.twitch.tv/turbo?no-mobile-redirect=true

I feel like that was close enough for their point to stand

> Why don't people just pay the $10/month if you consume enough for ads to annoy you?

What if you believe that ads are even unacceptable once if you watch twitch rarely?

Then you do not use the service, as that is the terms of the agreement.

Is it? Maybe twitch could make the terms more easier to understand. As it stands, it's a wall of text, almost nobody will consider. At first glance, I don't see any clause similar to what you suggest.

It’s clearly the intended exchange. It doesn’t have to be literally in the legal “terms” to affect your assessment of fairness.

I don’t tolerate ads; I don’t choose ad-supported services.

Yes, you are of course right. The comment was maybe a bit too passive aggressive. Sorry about that. There are more things to consider than just the terms of service and a moral or implied obligation of course extends past twitch and amazon to the content creators.

I wanted to point a bit toward the moral failings of the service providers themselves, which are many, in regards to ads and, in particular, tracking.

Their ad-free is $11.99/month.

It used to be $8.99/month. I was a pretty casual twitch viewer and I paid for it then. When they announced the move to 11.99/month I didn't re-up it and I just don't watch twitch now.

Funny how that $3/month was just enough for me to decide it was no longer worth it.

Every ad annoys me and they are a threat vector, and I don't watch enough Twitch that I think it's a good idea to give them my payment information.

Setting up a proxy for ad filtering is a one-time investment I can share with my friends that feel the same.

I'd pay a fifth of that, maybe. That's what it's worth to me.

If it's not worth the cost, shouldn't you not be using it then?

Then your time is not worth much.

People are entitled and constantly fed rhetoric online that it is morally acceptable to steal by blocking ads. As a YouTube content creator, who makes educational tech videos, I have seen my share of complaints because I dare to take a sponsorship. People simply do not assign value to digital goods, they are seen as free by default.

I do this because I have to protect my brain from marketers that are working against my financial interests, time management goals, and general mental hygiene. If I'm searching for, like in your case, tech info, it's because I want a solution to a problem that has nothing to do with getting sold crappy VPN services or mobile games.

We could have a decentralized and open medium for global information exchange. Instead, the web is a cesspool, and a large part of why is because we've commercialized everything.

Sundar has made the case before which I think is pretty good point: The open web is basically an ads driven model. Without ads the open web would be very different.

(Opinions are my own.)

The alternative is paywalls everywhere, or existing on donations. Try reading the Atlantic/NYT today and see you like the ad free model. Or try lemmy if you want to see the donation model.

Hacker news is based around tech and entrepreneurship still yes? What is the current audience that drives the upvote consensus that everything needs to be free AND ad-free?

Nice strawman you got there, would be a shame if someone had a different reason.

10 USD is too much to charge for ad free twitch. I don't WANT to support twitch, their reputation and brand isn't stellar.

They're probably one of the least awful, but I have better places to spend my money. Like the content creators on twitch. I begrudgingly pay twitch to support the streamers I watch and care about. but 10$ so streamers can get none of that... pass, if I care about the streamer, I'll unmute the small window, if I don't I'll close twitch.

Until adtech companies start acting more ethically as a rule. They deserve no consideration. Bad behavior might not excuse bad behavior, but it obviously encourages it.

They are free by default. Digital goods don't follow regular economics. A carpenter who makes a table can make ONE sale from that table. How many sales of a digital good can you have? What entitles you to potentially unlimited money from a set amount of work? Any attempt to turn limit digital goods to the way physical goods work, introduces friction and extra work only for the legitimate customers. Donation is the only ethical for of payment for digital goods.

Yes but their primary target audience is... Teens and young adults and maybe some p.dos looking for "ASMR sutff" if you now what i mean.

What that target audience have in common... tons on times and low to zero income, so since they have time to spend trying to not pay because they don't have money to begin with, then it will happen.

Twitch is betting on having a "YouTube moment", when those teens and young adults become adults with real money, they would love to avoid the hassle of going ad-free for 10 bucks a month because they love the content that is there, so for them would be at max 1 hour of their total income, meanwhile it has to stuck taking the loses till that moment happen.

Because eventually premium users will get ads too as we are seeing with many other streaming services.

First it’s pay, no ads. Then it’s higher tier for no ads. Then it’s higher tier no ads but watch a trailer at the beginning. Then it’s higher tier and ads.

/\----- This.

That's exactly what keeps me from even considering many subscriptions. As long as they're not clearly ad-free I don not care to even try them to check whether they are.

I'll happily pay for things like LWN, though, even though I'd get everything ad-free two weeks later anyhow.

You're refusing to pay for a product today based on what they might do in the future? Does the future possibility degrade today's product? Can't you just cancel your subscription if ads start showing up?

> Does the future possibility degrade today's product?

In some cases, yes. I specifically don't use Spotify in part because I can possibly lose access to my playlists and music I listen to in the future. Building a music collection is a big part of listening to music for me, so the future possibilities of the service actually degrade todays product.

I don't watch streams so I don't have any input on Twitch, but I could imagine someone having a similar outlook.

I don't use my twitch account ever anymore but I don't think there is really the same concept in twitch. I think most people probably watch 1-2 of their favorite streamers since watching streams is already such an incredibly time intensive activity. The most active someone can get is probably clipping short videos and curating clips.

I don't think you lose access to any of this when you unsubscribe, I think you just start seeing ads again when watching the live stream.

Frankly they already did it once. If you had a subscription you used to not get any ads on any streams, since about a year they reneged on that, and a subscription grants you no ads *only on the subscribed channel.

“Vote with your wallet”

for developing countries where the minimum wage is $10 per day (not hour), $11.99 each month is simply too expensive - money that could otherwise be spent on services that offer more than simply being ad-free. if it's $1 or $3 per month, that'd be reasonable.

if the ad-free subscription is bundled with Prime, def worth it.

Not everyone lives in the US (so 10$ can be quite high). Not everyone likes the service but there are no alternatives to the service and quite often we live in monopolies... like for vide YT has virtual monopoly and I prefer to support content creators directly but not google itself (let's be honest, YT is monopoly only because of shady google practices… and G itself bought YT because they couldn't compete with it... and it should have never been allowed in the first place…)

I’m already paying for a bunch of subscriptions on Twitch. Why am I expected to pay another $10 to block ads. Bittorent created a p2p streaming technology like 5 years ago.

> Why am I expected to pay another $10 to block ads.

You aren't.

Twitch Turbo costs $12/month. If you're spending more than that on multiple subscriptions then you're better off getting Twitch Turbo and not getting ads on any stream, rather than just those you subscribe to.

Because the plan is $11.99/Month for something I could get for free. All the other benefits (Chat Badge, Custom Username, More Emotes...) are irrelevant for me personally. I'd maybe pay $4.99/Month for no ads, but I'm not paying $12.

If Discord can offer me a Nitro and Nitro Basic, where the Basic plan pretty much has all the features I need for less than half the price 2.99 vs 9.99, so can they offer me a plan for just ad blocking, which is the main feature people want in the first place, either that, or they offer me something else that justifies me having to pay a premium for something I can get for free.

Not to mention that like many other people, I'm already indirectly supporting them through other means such as donations to specific streamers which they take a high cut of.

TL:DR: $12 is a lot of money for what they offer when I already support the people I watch and they siphon from that.

The vaft script with Ublock Origin works for me really well

There is Twitch Turbo but it's 3x more expensive than Youtube Premium and doesn't really have any special benefits. But hey Bezos might need a new yacht so guess the price is justified.

https://www.twitch.tv/turbo

Yup, i rarely have to update the commit link to that script. They seem to focus on taking down extensions that get popular rather than actually changing their obfuscation method.

What country? I'm seeing $12/mo for turbo and $14/mo for YT Premium

I'm in Hungary, Youtube Premium is 4.54€ while Turbo is 11.29€, ok not 3x just 2.5x

Haven't watched much twitch in the last 5-10 years, but Streamlink [0] still seems active, and was a really nice experience (before wide adoption of HTML5 video players) as a CLI and standalone media player enthusiast.

[0] https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink

It doesn't look like Streamlink is immune to the challenges of Twitch ads: https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink/issues/4949

The annoyingness to relevance ratio of twitch ads might be the best of any video platform. I find about one in five interesting. By contrast, I can't recall a single time YouTube has shown me anything interesting, relevant, or useful (lucky if it's not a downright scam), despite probably having seen ~100x more ads on YouTube than on Twitch.

I also appreciate that Twitch still displays the stream while ads play.

I've not had that experience. I just get the same Jack Reacher or Gillette ad over and over.

I rarely get a relevant ad on Twitch, but Instagram has my number. I'd say at least 10% of those ads are ones that I find relevant/click on.

These solutions are not perfect and typically stop working after a certain time because they patch it/unintentionally break it.

The only reliable solution I found is to VPN to some non-western country where they typically don't have advertisers. Of course, this brings a load of other issues :`).

Putting this on Microsoft GitHub is bound to get this project booted from the platform. Will we learn our lesson this time?

Never.

Regular old ublock works for replays on twitch since they cant just override the feed like they do on the streams. I just watch vods now.

Who has an actual solution for monetizing a "free" video platform?

Youtube makes tons of money. The issue with twtich is all the viewers are young and terminally online so they have adblock.

Could anyone have suggest for adblocking for Facebook and Twitter?

My local pihole provides great benefit blocking *.facebook.com

There's also Revanced Twitch on Android which has no ads.

I've been streaming for about 10 years on twitch. Not a huge personality, but I am a partner/affiliate and it's always hilarious to me despite serving who knows how many hundreds of hours of ads (that my viewers constantly complain about) that I can't really do anything about. and how little I actually get from it is a joke. I also get a pathetic share off of subscriptions and always encourage my viewers to save their money and donate to me off-platform if they so desire (but I don't encourage it, because I think my day job makes me way more than most of my viewers make).

I've been looking for another platform, considered youtube but it has much of the same issues. Maybe I'll go to tiktok.

> Maybe I'll go to tiktok.

TikTok is probably the worst one to make money from adverts.

I don't drive income from this other than what I can do to declare writeoffs on my taxes - I just want to provide a better experience for my viewers. It's objectively miserable watching twitch streams without adblockers.

If you are primarily trying to provide quality content for a few long-time viewers, you could try a discord stage channel. It'll destroy your discoverability, but for people who are already there, it's probably the best streaming platform there is atm

As a user I prefer YouTube because their premium offering is a great value especially shared in a family (zero ads + music streaming).

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