The Death of Streaming

I know this is a topic I've blabbered about quite a bit, but it's something that only continues to spiral more and more out of control. Advertisements during streams. Twitch being the most egregious culprit. I think out of pretty much every service that exists, Twitch's advertisement model is the worst. Actually, you know what? Strike that from the record. I take that back. Put the poop back in my butt. I'm not giving that crown to Twitch because I think mainstream media outlets are so much worse with their advertisements I don't know how many of you have gone on the internet with the condom off no ad blocker

It is miserable when you go to any news site like tabloids are the worst like Daily Mail's Obviously the Sun shit like that you will not even see your article. There'll be like four auto-playing ads everywhere fucking cerebral jacking in like Ford advertisements like the article is just Encapsulated entombed in so many ads so I actually think Journalism sites are much worse, but twitch is a close second anyway The reason why I'm yapping about this again is because a report was recently published about how Twitch viewership is down significantly

the lowest level it's been in five years since their bot crackdown which I've already touched on but a lot of people have been speculating that it's more than just the bots contributing to the decline in viewership. XQC's take recently just kind of popped off and has reopened this discussion to a broader audience and it's a really interesting one. He and many others believe that a lot of people are tuning out of Twitch because the ads ruin

the experience. What's going on on Twitch right now is often being compared to television. How TV started to decline once streaming got a foothold because most people switched from TV to streaming because they were fed up with all of the ad breaks interrupting them. It was far more convenient and a lot more enjoyable to just watch what you want to watch without any interruptions.

But of course that opened up its own can of worms with how many streaming services are popping up like fucking weeds across the globe. It is a goddamn pandemic. But the point is ads made people want to switch from that service, television, to something that had less ads. And in the streaming space right now we're seeing that with Twitch mainly, but not just exclusively to Twitch. YouTube. YouTube ads have recently been fucking exploding. Like

there are so many more ads now that users are noticing during streams. Though it can't hold a candle to Twitch where the standard affair of on Twitch if you don't have an ad blocker or if you're not subscribed to the streamer you want to check out is you go on Twitch, you go to a category, you click on a stream, you sit through like a two-minute pre-roll ad before you ever even see the content. You see like in the top right the countdown for how many more minutes of ads you have to sit through before getting to the

content you wanted to watch in the first place. And you say it's not worth it, and you exit out of that person's stream and then just go to someone that you're subscribed to or you just go somewhere else. Like I am at the point and I've been at this point for a while where if there's a pre-roll that plays I just leave. And on my streams there are pre-rolls not because I put them there it's because Twitch has it as an automated process. If you don't run at least like three

minutes of ad breaks, three minutes worth of ads for every hour that you stream Twitch puts pre-rolls there. You earn your good boy points through ad breaks on Twitch, and if you reach a certain threshold, they get rid of the pre-rolls. What benevolent saints. For me though, I don't do the three minute ad break, I do the literal lowest level possible.

I'll show you exactly what it looks like to clear up a lot of confusion I'm seeing, because now a lot of people are saying Twitch is blameless actually we need to all point our fingers at the streamers they're the ones that are running 30 minutes of ads per every hour they stream they're the ones that are greedy and putting the pre-roll ads there and you're half right there are streamers that do put the maximum amount of ads per hour possible and just force their viewers to just fucking take the punishment take the belt to the cheeks

But that shit sucks the pre-rolls are something that twitch does not the streamer so as you can see here

Streamers like you have to run up to three minutes of ads per hour in the past month streamers like you who are based in Us have 6k concurrent viewers stream gaming whatever have to run three minutes of ads per hour So they're trying to push that and if you don't, then you get the pre-rolls. So I have it set to 30 seconds of ads per hour that I stream. The actual lowest it can possibly go. And because of that I have pre-rolls that twitch shoehorns in there. But this can go all the way up to 22 minutes and 30 seconds worth of ads per hour that you stream. And I think there are streamers that do that. They just fucking have it go Insano-style turbo mode off the charts ads out the wazoo here for it.

And that is entirely on the streamers. That is not Twitch's fault. Like I do think that ruins streaming. Streamers that do that and try and like normalize that level of ads. That shit is diabolical. But as for the pre-rolls, that is on Twitch and I think that is a terrible terrible practice that is the antithesis to what streaming is supposed to be. Where it is just a live flow of content and you click on things that seem interesting or streamers that you might be interested in watching and no one wants to sit through fucking three

minutes before they even see that stream to see if they even like that streamer. They're just gonna leave, like I do. It's just stupid. But it is what it is. That's what the platform is and it's extremely annoying and I would actually say that the way Twitch does ads is worse than television ever was. By its very nature streaming is supposed to be a constant flow of content. You are watching something live and when it gets interrupted with a three-minute ad break it's not just like everything pauses while you watch those ads. You are just now missing three minutes of what you

tuned in to see. Whereas television, even when you're watching like a live sporting event, when the ad break pops up, there's a timeout. There is a break. You don't miss anything. Or if you're watching your favorite show and it gets to the big climax and then there's

an ad break, well the climax doesn't happen in the fucking background. You don't miss anything. When it comes to streaming, you do. So I think it is much worse and it is much more intrusive and it is far more out of control now than it ever was for TV because at least with TV there was like a set amount of commercial breaks. On Twitch, Lord knows, because streamers control it and there are a lot of streamers that just do like maximum ad breaks so it'll be

like fucking seven minutes worth of ads for every hour streamed or significantly more Like they could be doing three minute ad breaks every like ten minutes like it There is no telling how many ads you will be served when watching a twitch stream at least with TV You knew there was an expectation and there was plans around it from the content itself. Again, you didn't miss anything with the ad breaks with streaming you do. And it's annoying and people are really fed up. So I do agree with the take that

XQC has said as well as many others have said about how ads are literally leading to like the death of streaming. In particular on Twitch. Because Twitch is the worst offender for it. YouTube is going down that path with how many ads they're starting to shove down users throats. Twitch is still in a worse state with it and I don't see either platform improving in this department I just think they're going to make it even worse. Especially Twitch. Twitch I feel

like has been shredding water for a while. Now they do this bot crackdown, their numbers plummet for a little bit. I think that maybe scares them a bit about like the potential advertiser hit that they might take where the advertisers are like, oh Twitch this is a big drop maybe we won't spend as much on Twitch, maybe it's not worth the the budget that we're allocating over there. We're gonna cut back on this like and then they're gonna go even harder like pushing their other brand partners to try and like

Foster that relationship and keep it tight because they're gonna need to you know fucking latch on to it So I like I really feel like twitches direction with ads has only been getting worse and more and more Intrusive and ruining the experience further and further. YouTube is starting to follow suit because like I mentioned they are pumping a ton of ads on streams as well now. Not to Twitch's level yet but it is there and I just think that it is horrible for

streaming like in general. Nobody wants to sit through streams like that, where it's interrupted by minutes worth of ads for shit nobody wants in the first place. It is what caused TV to go in a bit of a rough patch there, because streaming offered a better ad-free service. And I've already seen some spitball solutions here

that I think are pretty trash. One of them was, well, you should be paying all the streamers anyway, so if you want to watch content ad-free, well, fork over some clams to the streamer and subscribe to them. What the fuck, Goober? No, that's super stupid. Streaming is free. Like, you are producing content for free. Getting any money back is just cherries on top. Like it is a service that is free and if you now start requiring people to pay money to keep experiencing that service, well

you've got an issue. Because never charge for something that was once free. That is like an age-old saying that remains true. You can find countless examples of that being proven time and time again. Nobody is going to want to pay for something that they were getting for free already. And it is, by its nature, a free service you're providing to viewers. If they like you so much they want to give you some money, then all power to them. I'm not their dad, they can make their own decisions and that's great, you know, everyone's happy, whatever. But this is not a solution to Twitch's inundation of ads to the platform.

Everyone shouldn't be required to spend money on the streams they want to watch in order to watch it uninterrupted and unimpeded. It sucks. That's silly. Another solution I've seen kicked around is, well maybe the streamers just need to do a better job of like planning their ad breaks, kind of like how TV used to do it. I already don't like where that's going, we're regressing now to old TV habits, but the idea is streamers, when they're about to run their ad break or when the ad

break is coming up, they pause everything and like tell their viewers all right here comes ads go stretch do that you know take some time if you don't want to watch them and then we'll come right back after the ads in like three minutes or whatever and I think there are some streamers that have experimented with that I don't know how well it's been received and theoretically it makes sense because at least then they're not missing any content but that's not gonna work for every stream. You can't do that for every stream. You can't plan around all that because these streams aren't planned.

Like I guess you can pause a game, sure, like that can kind of work to pause your game that many times for like stretch breaks and whatever, but it's not gonna work for every stream and every streamer. It just wouldn't. There's too many variables at play with every stream that happens. Also wouldn't. There's too many variables at play with every stream that happens. Also, I think it'd be very unfair to the people that just don't want to run ads in the first place. You can't just pause your stream

for the pre-roll ads. You'd never have a stream because everyone is gonna get a pre-roll ad when they come to your stream. How the fuck are you gonna ensure that they're not missing content with that pre-roll ad. They're going to. You have no way of stopping that. And I don't think the solution is to require everyone to start running, you know, X amount of minutes of ads per hour. People don't want to do that. Like me. I don't want to do that. It's that simple. So I don't think that's a good solution either. It is a complicated problem. I

recognize on Twitch's end they need to make money off their platform. Otherwise, how the fuck are they gonna keep it going? It's very expensive, and the way to do that is through advertising. But... Their advertising methodology, I think, is just really counterintuitive to what streaming is, and has been. And it's just going in a really bad direction that continues to make it worse. Yeah obviously I don't have all the answers there but there's got to be something because I really do think as this continues more and more people are

just not going to watch streams when an ad pops up and it'll probably just turn them off from even clicking on streams in the first place knowing that they're going to get ads before even going to it. So there's gotta be a solution. There's gotta be something to change with that from YouTube and Twitch's end of this inundation of ads. And yeah, I just kind of wanted to yap about it again.

That's really about it. That's really about it.

See ya.