Twitch is rolling out a new way to put adverts on streams, and it’ll impact viewers who pause streams for an extended period of time. And some users hate it already.
Adverts have long been a hot topic on Twitch. They are one of the biggest ways for streamers to make their money, but they can also disrupt broadcasts and force viewers to miss a vital moment. This has seen some streamers run ads manually on the hour, just like a traditional TV broadcast.
You can, of course, subscribe to Twitch Prime or Turbo to avoid ad breaks, but not everyone has the means to do so. Twitch has also introduced ads that take up space around the screen, so that the stream keeps playing, but isn’t totally disrupted.
On top of that, they’re now rolling out a new format of adverts which will impact anyone who pauses the stream to go do something else.
Twitch adds new ads for paused streams
That’s right, if you pause a stream, you may now encounter ads, even if you have to walk away from the screen.
“New ad-format experiment: Pause-screen ads. As a part of our ongoing work to make ads less intrusive while offering creators additional revenue sources, these ads will appear when a viewer pauses a stream,” Twitch Support announced on February 9.
“The skippable ads experiment is still ongoing at the same time.”
Twitch’s pause ads bring criticism
The announcement was met with a fair amount of backlash from viewers and creators alike, questioning Twitch over it.
“While I appreciate the attempt to make ads less intrusive, this won’t accomplish much as the viewer will be 30s-6 minutes behind the live on unpause. Ads that play without removing the stream would be ideal like if the stream could still be watched/heard while the ad played,” DansGaming suggested.
“In which universe is a viewer pausing a stream?” another asked. “Twitch just needs to do what YouTube does aka skippable ads,” another said.
“If I got an ad when I paused a stream, I would just click off. This is going to hurt streamers and further degrade the viewer experience,” added another.
Others called it a “strange move,” suggesting that some viewers only pause to refresh streams when there might be a technical issue. Though, we’ll have to wait and see what happens when people run into them in practice.
