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Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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