Why Everyone's WRONG about Twitch Forcing Midroll Ads

In a tweet announced in September - Twitch has announced they will now force ads to be run if streamers do not run the ads themselves. Similar to other platforms, "midroll" ads are ads played during a livestream. Previously a streamer could choose to run ads when/if they wanted to, and only preroll ads were not optional. With this addition, midroll ads will run if you don't manually run ads for 3 minutes of every 60 minutes of live broadcast.

My tweets about this are here:

https://twitter.com/DevinNash/status/1305684334691532802

https://twitter.com/DevinNash/status/1305697309015994368

Since I've received a fair amount of (expected) push back from small streamers on the addition of midroll ads and their necessity - this episode is made to clarify how the system and how/why it works. There will be a follow-up talk discussing complexities in how Twitch ads work, and how fill rates work.

There is so much misunderstanding about how the ad system on Twitch works. Most people haven't read and don't understand that if you run ads you will not get ads that interrupt your broadcast. Other complaints include smaller broadcasters getting less benefit from running ads, which is an argument that comes from just not understanding how ads work. You need to understand Twitch midroll ads, how midroll ads work, and the fundamental system behind how ads make money for streamers.

This is unfortunately a super nuanced topic that requires a lot of education to understand - so expecting some degree of ignorant negativity due to 'ads bad.'