After having read your new feature that allows streamers to disable Pre-Rolls by playing enough ads (30 seconds = 10 minutes), I think you've missed the mark slightly.

I DO think it's a good idea to disable the pre-roll for people discovering new content. As such, I believe a better implementation of the no preroll idea is the following:

• No pre-roll for users the FIRST time they join your stream BUT a forced 30 second 10 minutes into the stream if they stay.

This solves two problems. First, it solves the problem of discouraging people from discovering new content. You have clearly identified an issue with pre-rolls in how it impacts new viewers and presented the current solution. Second, it solves the financial issue by running the ad they would have seen in the pre-roll. It's the best of ALL worlds.

Overall, ads on Twitch are reasonable and not too intrusive, but this one quirk makes it more difficult for small streamers to support each other.

If someone ends their stream by hosting mine, I would like to be able to thank them and welcome them and any viewers who came along with them. But at the moment that I receive the host notification, I have to assume that none of them can see me because an ad just started playing for them. And if I host another streamer at the conclusion of my stream, my viewers and I don't get to see their reaction unless without pre-loading their stream, or watching the VOD later, or enabling an adblocker.

Revenue from host-transition ads must be next to nothing, and this does not seem like something that is done to nudge people towards paying for Turbo because the hosted streamer obviously cannot assume that most of the viewers coming over to their channel have Turbo.

Would love to get more information on how automated mid-rolls will work -- and specifically instruction for streamers on how to avoid them, if possible.

In short, the idea your stream would be interrupted without your control is a scary concept. Either it's going to be better for streamers to control the mid-roll experience themselves, or the experience is something more experimental that isn't clear (vs. simply interrupting a stream).

In the Twitch Support initial Tweet it says "these [mid-roll ads] won't run if the viewer has an ad break." Can you clarify? FAQ seems to be missing how to control mid-rolls (e.g. randomly served) if the creator manually runs? It only discusses how to "disable pre-roll" in the FAQ.

As possible additional information, it would be great to get a potential range of how many viewers it might effect in what territories.

Regarding this page: https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/ad-experience-experiment?language=en_US

Pre-rolls on twitch are not working right now because they are ignorant and focus on maximizing profits instead of the viewer experience. The dodge rates are incredibly high.

Change the system, let the creators hook the viewers into their content first before you throw an ad on their screen. there are two ideas on how to do it:

Let the creators modify the first picture of the thumbnail preview. this will drastically change the look of the main page, but it gives creators an additional window to communicate with potential viewers. You can send a message to showcase your content, instead of having only a limited title to work with.

Another idea without altering the look of the browse tab would be a delay of the pre-roll. Don't play it right away, but after 2-3 minutes. that way viewers have enough time to find a stream they enjoy before they receive their first ad. Afterwards the viewer is clear from ads for a set time on the channel he's watching.

Both ideas give users the opportunity to arrive on a stream, or get some expectations about what's coming up. right now there aren't any, that's why the motivation to watch the ads is often times extremely low.

Most of the streamers I watch usually play on the same roleplay server, and my average viewing session consists of constantly changing channels to see the roleplay from another perspective. Pre-roll ads are the biggest annoyance for me. Every single time I swap to a new channel I'm forced to sit through the same **** 30 second ad, and miss a large portion of whatever reason I was swapping perspectives. Random mid-roll ads can be just as bad, causing me to miss entertaining spontaneous situations.

I hate ads, but if ads are absolutely necessary at least leave it to the streamer to choose when to roll them so it doesn't interrupt the content.

The size of a channel matters when you are looking to make ad revenue. Larger audiences are likely to have a larger number of potential ad viewers. Obviously, the sub/non-sub viewer ratio is important, but larger channels are likely to have a higher potential for ad revenue than smaller channels.

Scaling the time needed to disable pre-roll ads will encourage smaller channels to run ads. When pre-roll ads are disabled, there is a higher chance a new viewer will enter the channel potentially helping to grow that channel.

To "tag" along with the idea, add a tag under a preview window showing which channels have pre-roll ads disabled so the viewer doesn't waste time waiting through a pre-roll ad to see if they may like the channel's content.

Ads should be created to work with the live stream, and not force the live stream to work around ads. Shaping content around ad breaks feels scripted and takes away from the "live" experience. In most cases, there are not enough viewers in a smaller channel to encourage the streamer to run ads to increase their monthly income. So, in turn that channel does not help support the platform. Working to scale ad run times with the size of the channel has the potential to help both the streamer and the platform.

Pre-roll ads don’t belong on live content to begin with, but they should never be as long as typical commercials/ads. Imagine clicking on a stream that you’re excited about watching in that very moment (because you saw something interesting in the thumbnail or someone tweeted about something happening on that stream) and then after the website loaded and the video player loaded, waiting another 30+ seconds for the live stream to load. That’s the current experience with pre-roll ads. It breaks the in the moment or “you had to be there” experience of live content.
A 5 second pre-roll ad is a more tolerable amount of time to wait for a live stream to load.

Give us the option to completely disable ads by "paying" you for the loss through taking a bit more of the revenue.

In my channel analysis ad income is less than 2% of the overall income, but (especially) pre rolls extremely reduced channel growth - which obviously would have raised my channel income much more than thos 2% for ads.

The numbers may vary from channel to channel, which is the reason to make it optional:
- No money loss for Twitch.
- Every streamer can decide for themselves, which is the best option.

Thanks for reading and have a nice day.

Picture-In-Picture was a good idea to roll ads non invasively. It initially dawned on my but I was unsure how to provide that feedback.

The UX on mobile is still rather rough when it comes to pre-roll ads, especially when people are co-streaming and you want to quickly swap between two channels.

I propose that on mobile, rather than play a video for an advertisement, a silent banner is placed under the video player, which could be used to embed dynamic content, for maybe ~5 seconds and then it could be dismissed. Keeping in mind that users might not have the best connection on mobile, this banner would ideally contain something that is lightweight.

As they are, advertisements on can also be quite jarring. If, for example, a user is wearing earphones and the stream volume is lower than the ad volume, then the user will experience possibly pain and discomfort while the louder advertisement is playing. Something perhaps to feedback to Amazon and your partners. This is a relatively frequent experience when watching a VoD.

I think in general, invasive advertisements are not appreciated, and more so on mobile, but it is one which is inescapable for the platform. Your attempts to address these challenges are appreciated of course. There are solutions to this problem but they are beyond the scope of this initial proposal.

Thanks!

I'm running advertisements on social media to increase my audience on Twitch.
With these pre-roll ads, everyone that clicks my advertisement has to watch this pre-roll ad on Twitch, meaning there's A LOT of potential fans that are not able to watch my concept for 1 single second because the ads are scaring them away.
Growing an audience on Twitch generally means more subs => more revenue for Twitch AND the streamer.
That's why I had the idea to let streamers pay for disabling the pre-roll ads.

I know there's an option to run ads on the entire stream, disabling the pre-roll for a few minutes, but in this case I have run an ad every hour to make sure the audience coming from external websites are not viewing this pre-roll add, which is totally ridiculous.

I'm sure there's a lot of other streamer facing this issue when doing marketing on other channels.

Increase the time pre-rolls can be paused, 2-3 minutes for 1hr would be more acceptable. Capping it at every 30 minutes is not acceptable for a show that runs for 4-8 hours.

Also Tier out or increase your AD revenue to streamers to give streamers more reason to run ADs.

Streamers can run 3-5 minutes of ADs every hour to eliminate pre-rolls all together, and then they would have control over their own content, be more likely to educate their communities that ADs are acceptable in this format because they are being compensated properly, and those mid-roll ADs would increase revenue for Twitch and the streamer while helping smaller channels gain and retain viewers.