@@ThatGuyNamedRickFully agreed, at the same time priority should be put on banning Big Pharmaceutical and Military Industrial Complex from buying news coverage as it can ONLY lead to extreme amounts of Propaganda.
I mentioned this in the UA-cam chat. However instead of calling it an adpocolypse could we call it a tagpocolypse since there has been a dramatic cut in people's advertising revenue around a specific tag group?
You cant say this without a shadow of a doubt, the doubt being that credible secoundhand sources are saying advertisers are pulling their spending from twotch. Either you dont believe that or you just are intentionally not including that because it creates dount in your argument. When Thor made that statement, it was one without a shadow of doubt, which is false. Its like saying weather experts cannot be trusted since the hard data or actual events like a hurricane hasnt occur. You could make an educated guess, be doubtfull of it but cannot make a concrete statement and be obtuse to evidence that causes doubt.
@@halifur1) That was an hour ago, stats changed. 2) How/why does it matter if a comment is ratioed by a reply supporting it? 3) How/why do you think it's enough of a thing to even talk about?
The lesson here is simple, whether or not this really is platform wide: Creators, you need to diversify your income streams, now. Any one of the platforms you depend on for your income can just pull the rug at any time. Sometimes it’s intentional, sometimes it’s not, but it can happen.
Yep! Just started uploading to Rumble, from Twitch streams that I also export to UA-cam. I'm still on the lookout for what would be the platform with the highest ROI, that isn't censorship addicted.
@@pfzhtSetting up patreon or something is also a good job. Or do what Mutha does and have another part time job in the meantime. It's really crappy how creators can always get the short end of the stick
@@miguelguillermo6159 I'm primarily concerned about reach, as I do have an income I can survive on. Is Patreon actually any good for getting discovered on?
I REALLY love how transparent you are in communicating stuff like this. Both asking questions in the open, and detailed answers to chat with questions related to things like this. Transparency is so important to help educate people on matters that most would otherwise have no insight into, and it helps prevent future misunderstandings for everyone involved. Transparency, clear communication and encouraging people to learn and immerse themselves into it instead of jumping on a band wagon are all skills that are transferable to every aspect of your life, and helping your viewers learn that is really good of you and something that will help a lot of people down the line.
I don't really go on twitch anymore. For a while I'd see who's streaming, click on someone I'm following, get hit with 4 adds before I get the watch and I immediately lose interest. Even if I have enough patience to power through the first adds, I still get hit with another 2 to 4 adds every 5 to 15 minutes. I know the streamers usually choose where they put adds and I know they're kinda forced to show adds in a way so I get it. But it makes the viewer experience so bad I just can't watch twitch anymore.
I have 2 Friends that are streamer and their strategy Is to Place as much as possible of the ADS at the start of the stream, and be very clear with the viewers "yes, i know It sucks, but this way you have less Ads during the rest of the stream" but then there are ADS they cannot do anything about and they are getting every time more invasive. It's really denting their community.
The few streamers I still occasionally watch do a thing where they take a quick break every hour or so to go get food/drink/use bathroom so they play an ad or two during those "pause" moments
Yeah twitch is lowkey unwatchable these days. Like at least with the old tv model the show stopped while ads were playing. Now you're missing huge chunks of live content at a time because "whoops, gotta play ads"
I'd reccomend everyone watches devin Nash's discussion with Thor on this. It's longer but it shows how Thor might not be 100% correct. Love the guy but I dislike how confident he is when he is unsure in reality
Twitch will also tag/flag your own channel. So if you have ever been discussing things that are political, or you show too much skin, you could have got the axe. Thing is, with Trump as the coming president, ready to start swinging at all kinds of controversial stuff, and Musk wanting to go after advertisers for fishy stuff, and with the unpredictable nature of Trump(who knows how he comes to the conclusions he does), advertisers are TERRIFIED, and rightfully so. The absolute 10000% best possible decision they could make is to tighten WAY up, by the books, on board, dotting their t's and dotting their i's, taking ZERO risks. And even then they're probably going to suffer somehow.
@@chaos-lovingrabbitUA-cam is already finding ways to disable ad blocked browsers to allow their site to be visited/used. Popular ones such as Brave are no longer a viable option.
AdGuard still works on Chrome for now I would use Opera or Brave Browser though at this point Google is being forced to sell Google Chrome for anti-competitive and monopolistic practices serves them right maybe they can sell it to Elon Musk and he can save adblockers.
Oh, you think it's bad now? I think Devon stack did a stream on it before, and there was an advertisement that was like almost 30 minutes. Pretty much half. The whole show was just the advertisements.
We also just had a major election in the US. Ad spending is going to inherently go down post-election as candidate and campaigns no longer need the advertising since they've already won or lost. This is going to naturally hit streams that discuss politics and not hit those who don't.
This isn't what's happening. I doubt much of the campaign spends on either side targeted twitch. Advertisers are specifically trying to avoid certain "political" tags. This includes tags like "Iran" and "Venezuela" which is bs and inadvertently racist since people from those countries who don't discuss politics are also being denied ad-revenue. If what you are saying was all that was happening streams with the tag "election" wouldn't go down from thousands of dollars to tens. They would just see a decrease of maybe like $50-$100 max
@@user-to7ds6sc3p They're served to everyone who opts out of location tracking (which only partially works because the internet is, at this stage, a panopticon *grumble,grumble*)
@@user-to7ds6sc3p American users are a pretty big market on a predominantly English-speaking platform like Twitch, though. How much that actually affects ad revenue hinges on how actively American politicians used Twitch for advertising
I am not sure if it's just me, but I feel like there's been more ads on UA-cam and they've been more annoying. Its not rare that I see 20 second ads without skip option. So annoying.
It isn't your imagination. YT ads have been ramping up, especially the 14.9 second unskippables. I prefer NewPipe for mobile, no ads and it can run with the screen off.
@@Laverbruh UA-cam appears to be doing a frog in the pot strategy with ads. They’ve been slowly increasing frequency while at the same time removing the option to skip more frequently. It could also be that some channels I watch are full sending ads and changing settings to not allow skipping, assuming that’s even possible. Either way, it’s an inconvenience, not a disaster. If the people I watch are making some extra coin because of this shift then so be it.
@@cyberdemon1702 Same. Don't know if it's UA-cam thing or creator thing, but I do know that I was listening to Omori OST on UA-cam and I've been getting ads after like every 5 songs (and most of those ads were un-skippable 20 seconds ads). I am not too sure, but can you not have any ad revenue on videos less that 8 minutes long? (all songs were separate video and less that 8 minutes) If so, then why un-skippable ads?? I find it weird.
It is wild to me though, i heard about this topic from DVAU where he was basically like "PirateSoftware is talking out of his ass with no evidence saying the adpocolypse isnt real" and hearing you actually talking about it im genuinely confused as to how he got that idea.
I've never heard of this DVAU before, so I can't really comment on them specifically. But, many content creators farm engagement via sensationalism. Thus they have a vested financial interest in attempting to quash more moderate takes on issues (irrespective of the accuracy of those takes).
@Endofnames the full name is DarkViperAU he's a pretty popular GTA streamer. He also does rambles where he talks about current events and other random shit and while I don't agree with all of his takes, most of the time he is decently accurate and not going for sensationalism. He does seem to genuinely believe most of the stuff he says as a lot of it started with the random topics that would come up in chat while he was gaming.
The Ads directed to broadcast are done all the time on TSN for hockey games, football games, etc. When watching a hockey game, keep an eye on the sides of the rink. The rink sells ad space to local advertisers. So for example, when watching a game in Detroit in the arena, you'll see ads for local businesses, or maybe Starbucks. People watching on TSN might occasionally see the actual physical ads, but if the system can pick up the rink sides correctly, you'll see the boards painted with ads semi-specific to your location. With football games, it's the stuff painted on the field and anything that might be seen on ad boards at the sides of the field. Baseball, it's the backfield area. This stuff coming to games via streaming is interesting, but yes, it does bypass paying the streamer, and that's crap.
The Burger King campaign was bad enough just with them "donating" $5 to advertise on streams but what made it worse is that they claimed to support streamers but in all the footage they made, they blurred the streamer's face, changed the voice and didn't provide any links to channels or anything like that. In most of the clips, they also changed the game play footage to some generic crappy flash game (presumably to avoid copyright). They actively avoided supporting streamers.
Corporate policy changes have always been Area of Effect in the worst way possible. Imagine trying to control a situation when the best thing you have is the ingredients to make a house fire... you or your team will inevitably create a house fire. You don't want to create a house fire, but when you're locked in a pitch dark tinderbox and given a bucket of gasoline and a box of matches and told "fix this situation" you're gonna have to dump the gas somewhere even if it's to use the bucket to fill it up with water pick up water, and you're gonna have to burn some matches to see in the dark. Something somewhere will go fwoosh.
6:02 was literally typing a message about how it makes sense that companies would jackup advertising leading up to Christmas then cut it dramatically following Christmas so it feels nice to have my thoughts validated in real time
It's funny how things are just coming full-circle back to Cable again: ad breaks on streaming, various platforms bundling together(Disney, Hulu, and ESPN have a bundle together for example). There's even ads/ad-free rates for at least a few services. Been interesting watching these things evolve over the last couple decades
43:15 Back in the dark ages of Twitch I would occasionally get hit with "ads" that were actually news reports so they were several hours long. The longest I watched was about a trainwreck at 3.5 hours. Had the stream open in another window.
I once got an ad that was 2.5 hour long religious sermon. it wasn't on twitch though, it was here on UA-cam. 🤣 it turns out YT doesn't vet shit, and someone uploaded a whole ass movie into the ad system. Wonder if they ever fixed that.
5:08 Looking at my past 4 years of Twitch, I often find that ad revenue dips in September into October and I put it down to SUBtember resulting in a higher sub count which makes sense to me as more Subscribers would result in less people being served ads and thus less ad revenue. This is of course assuming that CCV and Hours watched remain roughly the same.
What is really fascinating about those "dips" is they translate through our ENTIRE economy. Our economy functions in quarters (well, thirds, but corporate overlords call it quarters) and there are HUGE dips in January, March/April, and September.
I saw YukkoEX, a trans V-tuber also complain about this for a different reason. [Editing in a TL;DR: the worry is that tags could be used to not run ads against LGBT content, pushing out the viability of LGBT streamers. The Bud Light problem.] The requirement for tags for policial content also includes language to not talk about "ideology around sexuality, gender, race or religion". This was seen to opening the door to get any pro LGBT stream forcibly tagged as LGBT because quite often these figures will talk about their lived experience, or have people in chat talk about lived experiences. I believe twitch has had to make a clarifying tweet around people being aloud to talk about lived experiences, but i imagine that will not stop people reporting channels or whatever the mechanism of enforcing tags will be. [Edit Thor talks about this around 26:27] This language is made less flattering being included beside "talking about legislation [about LGBTQ rights, etc.]" and "talking about war, conflicts and national security issues." If the UA-cam apocalypse is anything to go buy, this will have a nock-on effect on the viability of LGBT streaming on twitch, I imagine regardless of whether it is illegal by twitch standards. The barrage of complaints will be a nightmare for SOMEONE to deal with and/or the forced LGBT tags will ad-pocalypse specific demographics of creators.
Brands are already targeting and pulling out of brand deals with LGBT creators after the election so I have no doubt on my mind that we especially will be targeted by the adpocalypse
the question would then be: -if a soldier in a warzone streams and talks about his daily life, is that than not talking about war? -if a politician starts streaming, can he talk about political topics, he encounters in his daily life? or isnt that then just politics? - what about a P-star talking about her work? isnt that then also explicit content? not wanna say, that its not bad for the streamers and there should be a solution. im just thinking how other genres, just would use the same logic to monetize their stuff, that advertisers not wanna have their ads played on.
@spliffingrat5469 i think the difference is that human rights violations are different than something like talking about sex and violence. Its one thing to talk about how you might deal with discrimination for being part of the LGBT community, but it's different when you're talking about stuff like imperialism if you're a veteran.
@@lssjgaming1599 a soldier in an active warzone, talking about his daily life isnt a veteran talking about imperialism. when a soldier talks about what he does in war, why they do certain things, how many people died that day, then its his lived experience. you talk about "human rights violations". see how advertisers maybe not wanna have their ads played bevor that? here on YT stuff like that gets also demonetized, especially if a light is shined on it, like twitch has right now. you make +18 (non-sexual) content? well, enjoy minimum reach, limited ads and a long term fight for your "right"to those limited ads. (its a privilege btw to get paid for your content by ads. lets never forget that. especially if you have "1st world" audience). so you not only f´ed your own channel, you now show the little amount of people who watch your stuff some scam ads. so only google is making stonks, while the rest suffers lol
@@spliffingrat5469 Twitch actually classifies veterans as a protected class. Like, I used to watch a guy who was banned for hate speech because his comments on U.S. soldiers. Advertisers aren't opposed to politics though. I think that's fairly easy to demonstrate: everyone runs ads at NFL games and they double as recruitment drives for the military. What they're actually averse to is confrontation.
Nice. Love that burrito index. Its up there with the big mac index. Also on the note of Burger king dropping $5 on advertising in streams. Was this about a year ago when Twitch had "hype chat" where you could essentially pin your message to the top of chat, and the time it stayed there for was based on how much money you put in? (kind of like super chats in UA-cam live streams) .... I remember those, I heard that mods and streamers didnt even have the option to unpin/delete them. That's now evolved into bit cheers with pin ability, but can be taken down by streamer/mods if they want. Sucks to hear DK were being dumb and thinking people would be okay with it.
Man, I am fairly sure UA-cam started recommending me your videos because of my friends, but wow am I glad, because you explain somewhat complex things in an easy to understand way, thank you for all of the info you provide.
Thank you for another deeply educational video, Thor. I actually assumed it was common knowledge that ads drop after December (and common sense, actually). I'm also always very happy to see someone combat the doom-sayers and sensationalists with rationalism and facts.
I really respect your approach to ads. Ads are a fact of life on the internet, but at least when I see them on your channel I know I'm not missing anything. But more importantly you're transparent about where the ad revenue goes - watch this ad, pay the mods. Watch this ad, help us buy ferret food. Watch my ads so other people don't get one before the stream even starts.
@Pirate Software Ad volume: I doubt this isn't retread for you of all people, but feels very relevant to this, and never got mentioned. FCC restrictions are based on Decibels, which are not directly related to human perception. Scummy ads will circumvent this by using a low Decibels, but high LUFS which is contextually much louder to the human ear.
We (a big shoe brand) were warned by our MSSP and Proofpoint about a targeted effort to attack Twitch advertisers on Oct 25th, and our executives started getting thousands of emails a day and my WAF was getting ddos levels of script kiddie attacks on our ecomm sites. We totally pulled our twitch ads after that mess and are still waiting for it to calm down before restarting.
Can confirm. I work in the ads industry as a secretary for both digital/print for American clients. Lots of shit going on starting around November specifically (11/22/24 i am in pain), December everyone goes on break, January slows the hell down post-holiday.
This is wild to learn about! When I worked for LFP Broadcasting / Hustler as a programming coordinator (basically compiling/titling/synopsizing content for export to major operators like Comcast and Time Warner) we would actually see the exact same drop in content buys (from operators AND their consumers) right around that Dec-Jan-Feb span. It was always - always - our slowest period.
I could have sworn it was earlier, but the CALM Act was passed in 2010! (Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act) But I do remember having to deal with those ads in the late 90s, while I was in middle/high school; I would always have to sit with the mute button ready, unless I was choosing to go to the bathroom during the commercials (and then I could hear them from down the hall!).
@@rimprant2796 true but that’s not really what this person is saying. They are looking for a deep dive into the nuts and bolts. We get a pretty thorough rundown from Thor on his streams but it would be cool to get some video action showing “a day in the life”. How the meals are prepared, some of the medical stuff (administering chemo for example) etc
Reminds me of that thing with the factory tour in China that I saw. "This sounds a lot like a Black Mirror episode" - "Yes, isn't it wonderful?" - "Black Mirror is supposed to be horror." And I think we're seeing the same with 1984. It's something that's supposed to be avoided, yet we're on a slippery slope towards newspeak and a total loss of privacy.
I was on twitch before amazon, i'm a Partner. I had to quit for health reasons a couple years ago, and could've come back this year but didn't cuz i felt like if i didn't hustle things I didn't want to be a part of there was no space for things I loved. Using my digital game design degree, playing mods, making pvp builds, gaming, are hopefully gonna make a comeback.
The ad amount thing isn't always a lie. I have gotten 15 ads once but it was still 2 minutes. So 25 ads doesn't sound off. What happens is the more ads on twitch the less time each individual ad takes to play out
Story about language in the first 15 seconds. I used to work as a projectionist, and usually for this big multiplex there were two of us. Often, when something was reaching the end of its run, we'd have something share a theater. Back and forth if they're similar, early for kids films, late for PG13 and R rated films. Cool. So one day I get a frantic call and run to the projector. A bunch of kids piled into the theater to see the movie Elf. The movie that was lined up... was Bad Santa. And that first 15 seconds is Billy Bob Thornton cursing his brains out, that's how the theater learned the wrong movie was running. Boy that was fun to fix.
I have a question. as a very small streamer i don't care about the ads revenue, but the ads themself are annoying for peoples who watch me. can i just add the tag "politics" or something like that, and peoples won't get ads anymore while watching me?
I'd imagine this could work although the ad revenue has dropped by up to 80% you would still see some ads. I actually remember someone [it might've been Thor] state that having ads in the middle of the stream is better than pre-rolls. People rarely stick around to sit through pre-roll ads, but if they're already invested they will tolerate the mid roll ads. This means higher engagement throughout the stream, and an influx of newer viewers comparatively. I'd try without the tag for two weeks, and then with the tag for two weeks. Have an account or friend record how many ads they get per week on average and then compare. That way you have a data-driven idea of how much ads are affected by having the tag vs not.
To Tichat's original question, for now the answer seems to be yes. Should reduce ads, if not remove them. It could get patched at any time, and Twitch may see it as an exploit. If your not making headlines you SHOULD be safe to do it, but technically dangerous. But with Rasmachris's pre-rolls vs stream adbreaks. The only problem I see with that is other platforms get stuck with the ad breaks. So youtube viewers 'suffer' for adbreaks 'caused' by Twitch. Probably the best way to do it now, but someone gets the short straw.
I believe this is exactly what asmongold did when twitch forced ads on his streams. And hes not small. I don't watch him so can't say for sure but I think so.
It is a real MASTER CLASS of twitch. I appreciate how you operate on it with full transparency, and full respect for your viewer, great job @Pirate Software!
25:45 I swear, no one is willing to troubleshoot their own problems. They're all like "It's broken! Fix this!" and when asked if they've know how it's broken, they will just say the general thing that isn't helpful at all. People are losing ad revenue but don't know why and come up with crackpot theories or just say "it's the adpocolypse" without actual knowledge of what is happening. Combined with other people giving wrong info, this wrong spiral just keeps getting bigger. Thank you, Thor, for actually testing this. An example I can give that happened to me recently is that my main computer monitor stopped working in the middle of being in use. 99% of these people would go "it's broken!" and just replace it immediately. I actually wanted to see if it wasn't fully broken. Is it getting power? Yes, the power indicator LED is on. Is it on my pc's end? I have 2 monitors in use and the other is working, so it's not that. Is it one of the ports on my gpu? I swapped which port the two monitors plugged in to, main still has no image. Is it the plug on the monitor? Swapped which cables around on the monitor end, still no image. Instead of Display Port, is the HDMI port working? Plug an HDMI cable in to main monitor and pc. It works. I have now figured out that it's not the whole monitor that's dead, just the Display Port. While I probably will need to replace it before too long, I don't need to replace it now. People would be surprised at how many things can be easily fixed if they just turned on their brains.
Working my two jobs I see this every year. It's the regular sales curve. Holidays and then school starts/ends will show the rises and dips. As an independent artist, I pump and push ads on the main months and go lean on the others.
Some cool info about Bluesky. The 'Feeds' are separate servers maintained by the people who created them. They pay a fee and those within it can donate to help maintain the server. I can see the appeal for ads, but if the ecosystem is building on community support with an active community, I can see Bluesky delaying ads.
That ad insert into the broadcast is VERY interesting tec. I wonder if this could be used to do other things, like making the game look entirely different over the broadcast (like covering up nudity or something automatically if the viewer toggles on safe mode for example), or showing the viewers information hidden from the streamer in a chat-vs-streamer type game.
Most of the platforms serving ads do charge advertisers for ads that are served even if the ad is muted. This also applies to if the tab is out of view or the window is hidden, even when ads are tracking if the tab and ad are viewable. There may be some exceptions, but from my understanding this isn't common.
I just wanted to inject some more testing data into the Turbo vs Sub discussion. I'm fairly certain I'm the only Turbo user in my friends stream - which I am also subscribed to - and he still gets Turbo ad rev from me. So, a new data point!
A real Adpocalypse would be if large corpos started pulling their advertisements from Twich entirely. It sometimes has a cascade event, especially if the reason for pulling ads is dire enough. The only way i could see an Adpocalypse happening on Twitch would be if the NSFW content on the site started to saturate the site so much that it becomes a Phub-Lite of sorts. They will pull ads if the colloquially named "Twitch Thots" were to become the standard bearer of the platform. Though im sure that Twitch would throw the TT's under the bus before they let advertisers leave on mass.
"you make me a millionaire, and ill keep paying the employees more. you cant stop me." --- love that you say that. your awesome. keep up the great work.
19:03 I have that feeling with our company. We are contract lab and about 90% of company policies, workflows, procedures etc. is dictated by customers. They say jump, we ask how high. They ask for elephant, we ask what colour? They own us essentialy, but with extra steps.
Re Bluesky surviving without ads: I think that Bluesky has a lot higher chances to survive without ads than most other services. Primarily because it's intended as a distributed service where the Bluesky company itself doesn't have a big role with community hosted PDS, proxies, app views, etc
September being lower BPM/viewer makes sense because that's when students are going back to school. Parents are "tapped out" because of buying school supplies, and their children are often the deciding factor on buying fast food. So a .9 to .68 makes sense. October being a dud though, yeah, that's strange, especially since you'd think Halloween themed deals would be taking off.
I think you dismissed the article unfairly - "non-political streamers see normal revenue" and "key advertisers pause spending" are not contradictory statements. And, yeah, the first data point suggests that there is no adpocalypse. Which is a good thing.
Hello. An additional set of data that might be interesting to look at, if you're tracking this for several years, is the difference in the monthly changes between years. Like, lets say January 2022 and 2023 both had a drop of 50% in ad revenue. Now, January 2024 instead had a drop of 95% (note: all percentages pulled directly from my rectum) Stats like that can also show smaller trends that can be used to predict larger ones
When he was talking about New Speak all I could think of was Idiocracy. The guy who would say "Brought to you by Carl's Junior" did it for the money and now creators are saying "unalive" for the money.
It's good that they changed the wording about the LGBTQ+ tags. Even though I still think queer persons need to be able to advocate for their right to exist. Yes, that would be legislation but it's human rights. I don't think we should demonetize people for wanting to legally exist. Also, I'm not a streamer, so I don't know how this system works exactly, but how would twitch even differentiate between people who have LGBTQ adjacent tags because they talk about those politics and people having the tag because it's their identity. I don't see a way how, without manual classification, they would prevent queer people or allies getting demonetized simply because they have that tag, even without talking about the politics.
18:06 there's an important caveat there: "so long as live video is playing" -- many browsers will pause muted background video elements to save power until you return to the tab.
There is actually a bug I've had with adblockers before that causes ads to keep running like it's just not detecting that I've seen it or something, turning off the adblocker fixes it straight away though.
I hate the idea of ads being displayed in game that the streamer cannot see but I think the technology has potential for new innovative gameplay that incorporates the audience more. Imagine a puzzle or mystery game but only the audience can see certain things so they have to work together with (or against if they want I guess) the streamer to complete the game.
Personally i HATE ads.. all of them! If i click to watch content, i want to watch that content. Not to see ads about stuff i wont buy anyway. Its annoying as hell. And paying a monthly subscription to disable ads is insane to me. That being said, i do understand basically everything runs of money from ads.
Problem with the pre-roll ads is that you can't turn it off from the get go, you need to have a certain amount of people follow you and interact in your streams in order to even turn them off to begin with, so any new Twitch streamer will have to have pre-roll ads turned on which isn't cool ah
"people want to be smarter than they are, so what they believe is true becomes a hysteria." I have no idea who said this, but I think Thor reworded it so perfectly in this 30 minute video
I was actually trying to stop UA-cam from recommending me some channels, and some of them cannot be removed. Some ads seem to be unable to be removed, strangely enough (talking about outside of UA-cam)
Thor mentions Iran in passing on a video talking about the adpocalypse being related to political streams... welp, there goes Novembers ad revenue. Twitch Turbo sounds like... a traditional payment model, where you pay for a membership and you don't see ads.
I really wish people would learn to take these articles from Richard Lewis with more skepticism. He has a consistent pattern of pushing articles out as fast as possible to get the "scoop"" and often results in incomplete or incorrect information being reported because he prioritizes getting the news out first and doesn't check the information via other sources.
I noticed the pull back from businesses advertising in Politics, specifically social politics back in June or July Shortly Following an event that should be obvious. It’s almost as if they wanted nothing to do with the extremes anymore, and so they started propping them up less by advertising less, Or putting themselves in a position where they could be boycotted As easily. And of course you have people who are utilizing that boycott following a few streamers banning. So that reduce political advertising even further. Basically they all brought that on themselves if they were in politics, it’s their own fault. The only piece of data I didn’t have is as he’s having here from normal people who don’t get Into extremes in politics. So it’s rather interesting to see that the only people who actually were affected by what I noticed were quite literally people who can’t keep their nose out of other people’s business a.k.a. Politics. Drama farming, Reactions, Sensationalism, In the past, those are basically what advertisers relied on because they got the most attention. But it’s gotten so extreme. It just seemed like they started to pull back from that several months ago. And it’s only really now being noticed and felt due to a few other incidents.
I have seen that muting a stream doesn’t count towards drops usually, so I’d argue the same would happen towards ads not counting if they work the same
I thought the adpocalypse was gonna be about the sheer number of ads that play, my buddy is a small streamer and has ads turned to minimal and I still get 2-3 15-30 second ads every 5 minutes which is pretty bad.
TLDR; 😮 oh no! Anyways….
🤣
Guess they'll either move on with their lives or come to UA-cam.
I believe no one should be able to profit off of politics. It's too easy to bait and drag viewers into echo chambers and extort them.
@@ThatGuyNamedRickyou just described what has happened to most of the USA to make them vote for the r apist
@@ThatGuyNamedRickFully agreed, at the same time priority should be put on banning Big Pharmaceutical and Military Industrial Complex from buying news coverage as it can ONLY lead to extreme amounts of Propaganda.
@@ThatGuyNamedRickdamn it’s almost like that’s exactly what’s happening in America right now…
Philosophers: "How could you ever truly measure the worth of a human life?"
Thor: "It's 0.8 burritos per month."
Damn I’m being grossly overvalued
now THAT'S a unit of measurement i can get behind.
And Burritos are Wellingtons
I mentioned this in the UA-cam chat. However instead of calling it an adpocolypse could we call it a tagpocolypse since there has been a dramatic cut in people's advertising revenue around a specific tag group?
I like it tbh, good stuff
Agree on this.
Using tags for monetization targets is really not great.
@@angela_eric how did you get ratioed 😭😭
You cant say this without a shadow of a doubt, the doubt being that credible secoundhand sources are saying advertisers are pulling their spending from twotch. Either you dont believe that or you just are intentionally not including that because it creates dount in your argument. When Thor made that statement, it was one without a shadow of doubt, which is false. Its like saying weather experts cannot be trusted since the hard data or actual events like a hurricane hasnt occur. You could make an educated guess, be doubtfull of it but cannot make a concrete statement and be obtuse to evidence that causes doubt.
@@halifur1) That was an hour ago, stats changed.
2) How/why does it matter if a comment is ratioed by a reply supporting it?
3) How/why do you think it's enough of a thing to even talk about?
The lesson here is simple, whether or not this really is platform wide:
Creators, you need to diversify your income streams, now. Any one of the platforms you depend on for your income can just pull the rug at any time. Sometimes it’s intentional, sometimes it’s not, but it can happen.
Yep! Just started uploading to Rumble, from Twitch streams that I also export to UA-cam. I'm still on the lookout for what would be the platform with the highest ROI, that isn't censorship addicted.
@@pfzhtSetting up patreon or something is also a good job. Or do what Mutha does and have another part time job in the meantime. It's really crappy how creators can always get the short end of the stick
@@miguelguillermo6159 I'm primarily concerned about reach, as I do have an income I can survive on. Is Patreon actually any good for getting discovered on?
@@pfzht No. Patreon is not for discovery, it's for people who are already fans to support you.
@Thiefwriter that's about what I thought of it.
I REALLY love how transparent you are in communicating stuff like this.
Both asking questions in the open, and detailed answers to chat with questions related to things like this.
Transparency is so important to help educate people on matters that most would otherwise have no insight into, and it helps prevent future misunderstandings for everyone involved. Transparency, clear communication and encouraging people to learn and immerse themselves into it instead of jumping on a band wagon are all skills that are transferable to every aspect of your life, and helping your viewers learn that is really good of you and something that will help a lot of people down the line.
I don't really go on twitch anymore. For a while I'd see who's streaming, click on someone I'm following, get hit with 4 adds before I get the watch and I immediately lose interest. Even if I have enough patience to power through the first adds, I still get hit with another 2 to 4 adds every 5 to 15 minutes. I know the streamers usually choose where they put adds and I know they're kinda forced to show adds in a way so I get it. But it makes the viewer experience so bad I just can't watch twitch anymore.
I have 2 Friends that are streamer and their strategy Is to Place as much as possible of the ADS at the start of the stream, and be very clear with the viewers "yes, i know It sucks, but this way you have less Ads during the rest of the stream" but then there are ADS they cannot do anything about and they are getting every time more invasive. It's really denting their community.
Same
The few streamers I still occasionally watch do a thing where they take a quick break every hour or so to go get food/drink/use bathroom so they play an ad or two during those "pause" moments
I pay for both Twitch Turbo and UA-cam Premium to avoid this problem.
Yeah twitch is lowkey unwatchable these days. Like at least with the old tv model the show stopped while ads were playing. Now you're missing huge chunks of live content at a time because "whoops, gotta play ads"
I like knowing that we are not numbers to Thor, we are simply burritos
You are the best burritos.
Put me back in the microwave, chief
@@CaptainAmphy Just don't complain to me when ya pop
I'd reccomend everyone watches devin Nash's discussion with Thor on this. It's longer but it shows how Thor might not be 100% correct.
Love the guy but I dislike how confident he is when he is unsure in reality
Twitch will also tag/flag your own channel. So if you have ever been discussing things that are political, or you show too much skin, you could have got the axe.
Thing is, with Trump as the coming president, ready to start swinging at all kinds of controversial stuff, and Musk wanting to go after advertisers for fishy stuff, and with the unpredictable nature of Trump(who knows how he comes to the conclusions he does), advertisers are TERRIFIED, and rightfully so.
The absolute 10000% best possible decision they could make is to tighten WAY up, by the books, on board, dotting their t's and dotting their i's, taking ZERO risks. And even then they're probably going to suffer somehow.
I hate ads with a passion. It feels like there is ad in my face every 5 seconds. Like in the last 5 years the ads have gone CRAZY
Use Brave browser. No ads in like 7 years.
Browser with ad blocker
My saviour
@@chaos-lovingrabbitUA-cam is already finding ways to disable ad blocked browsers to allow their site to be visited/used. Popular ones such as Brave are no longer a viable option.
AdGuard still works on Chrome for now I would use Opera or Brave Browser though at this point Google is being forced to sell Google Chrome for anti-competitive and monopolistic practices serves them right maybe they can sell it to Elon Musk and he can save adblockers.
Oh, you think it's bad now? I think Devon stack did a stream on it before, and there was an advertisement that was like almost 30 minutes. Pretty much half. The whole show was just the advertisements.
We also just had a major election in the US. Ad spending is going to inherently go down post-election as candidate and campaigns no longer need the advertising since they've already won or lost. This is going to naturally hit streams that discuss politics and not hit those who don't.
This isn't what's happening. I doubt much of the campaign spends on either side targeted twitch.
Advertisers are specifically trying to avoid certain "political" tags. This includes tags like "Iran" and "Venezuela" which is bs and inadvertently racist since people from those countries who don't discuss politics are also being denied ad-revenue.
If what you are saying was all that was happening streams with the tag "election" wouldn't go down from thousands of dollars to tens. They would just see a decrease of maybe like $50-$100 max
I don't think that has any major impact, as election ADs should only be served to American viewers.
@@user-to7ds6sc3p Considering that American viewers might be good chunk of add revenue, so it might have some impact.
@@user-to7ds6sc3p They're served to everyone who opts out of location tracking (which only partially works because the internet is, at this stage, a panopticon *grumble,grumble*)
@@user-to7ds6sc3p American users are a pretty big market on a predominantly English-speaking platform like Twitch, though. How much that actually affects ad revenue hinges on how actively American politicians used Twitch for advertising
I read the thumbnail as: "let's talk ass"
*raspberry noises*
I mean yeah, basically.
I'd listen to Thor talk about ass for 50 minutes
I like ass
This comment right here, Baseball Doggo.
Twitch: has a problem
Thor: “wait i had a pull request for that”
I am not sure if it's just me, but I feel like there's been more ads on UA-cam and they've been more annoying. Its not rare that I see 20 second ads without skip option. So annoying.
Use an ad-blocker my dude. Haven't seen a single ad in at least 8 years. And no, I'm not paying for Premium.
@@no_alias_for_me Cant really have an ad blocker on phone... I do have an ad-blocker on PC tho
It isn't your imagination. YT ads have been ramping up, especially the 14.9 second unskippables. I prefer NewPipe for mobile, no ads and it can run with the screen off.
@@Laverbruh UA-cam appears to be doing a frog in the pot strategy with ads. They’ve been slowly increasing frequency while at the same time removing the option to skip more frequently. It could also be that some channels I watch are full sending ads and changing settings to not allow skipping, assuming that’s even possible. Either way, it’s an inconvenience, not a disaster. If the people I watch are making some extra coin because of this shift then so be it.
@@cyberdemon1702 Same. Don't know if it's UA-cam thing or creator thing, but I do know that I was listening to Omori OST on UA-cam and I've been getting ads after like every 5 songs (and most of those ads were un-skippable 20 seconds ads). I am not too sure, but can you not have any ad revenue on videos less that 8 minutes long? (all songs were separate video and less that 8 minutes)
If so, then why un-skippable ads?? I find it weird.
It is wild to me though, i heard about this topic from DVAU where he was basically like "PirateSoftware is talking out of his ass with no evidence saying the adpocolypse isnt real" and hearing you actually talking about it im genuinely confused as to how he got that idea.
I've never heard of this DVAU before, so I can't really comment on them specifically. But, many content creators farm engagement via sensationalism. Thus they have a vested financial interest in attempting to quash more moderate takes on issues (irrespective of the accuracy of those takes).
@Endofnames the full name is DarkViperAU he's a pretty popular GTA streamer. He also does rambles where he talks about current events and other random shit and while I don't agree with all of his takes, most of the time he is decently accurate and not going for sensationalism. He does seem to genuinely believe most of the stuff he says as a lot of it started with the random topics that would come up in chat while he was gaming.
@@Endofnames exactly, "ADPOCALYPSE IS HERE" type of content gets more clicks than actual analysis, sadly
The Ads directed to broadcast are done all the time on TSN for hockey games, football games, etc. When watching a hockey game, keep an eye on the sides of the rink. The rink sells ad space to local advertisers. So for example, when watching a game in Detroit in the arena, you'll see ads for local businesses, or maybe Starbucks. People watching on TSN might occasionally see the actual physical ads, but if the system can pick up the rink sides correctly, you'll see the boards painted with ads semi-specific to your location.
With football games, it's the stuff painted on the field and anything that might be seen on ad boards at the sides of the field.
Baseball, it's the backfield area.
This stuff coming to games via streaming is interesting, but yes, it does bypass paying the streamer, and that's crap.
Women m
The Burger King campaign was bad enough just with them "donating" $5 to advertise on streams but what made it worse is that they claimed to support streamers but in all the footage they made, they blurred the streamer's face, changed the voice and didn't provide any links to channels or anything like that. In most of the clips, they also changed the game play footage to some generic crappy flash game (presumably to avoid copyright). They actively avoided supporting streamers.
Corporate policy changes have always been Area of Effect in the worst way possible. Imagine trying to control a situation when the best thing you have is the ingredients to make a house fire... you or your team will inevitably create a house fire. You don't want to create a house fire, but when you're locked in a pitch dark tinderbox and given a bucket of gasoline and a box of matches and told "fix this situation" you're gonna have to dump the gas somewhere even if it's to use the bucket to fill it up with water pick up water, and you're gonna have to burn some matches to see in the dark. Something somewhere will go fwoosh.
Thor: "They also don't like it if you curse within the first 15 seconds of a video"
Also Thor: *Says shit within the first 15 seconds of the video*
6:02 was literally typing a message about how it makes sense that companies would jackup advertising leading up to Christmas then cut it dramatically following Christmas so it feels nice to have my thoughts validated in real time
It's funny how things are just coming full-circle back to Cable again: ad breaks on streaming, various platforms bundling together(Disney, Hulu, and ESPN have a bundle together for example). There's even ads/ad-free rates for at least a few services. Been interesting watching these things evolve over the last couple decades
*Greed knows no bounds.*
Companies never respect people.
43:15 Back in the dark ages of Twitch I would occasionally get hit with "ads" that were actually news reports so they were several hours long. The longest I watched was about a trainwreck at 3.5 hours.
Had the stream open in another window.
I once got an ad that was 2.5 hour long religious sermon. it wasn't on twitch though, it was here on UA-cam. 🤣
it turns out YT doesn't vet shit, and someone uploaded a whole ass movie into the ad system. Wonder if they ever fixed that.
5:08 Looking at my past 4 years of Twitch, I often find that ad revenue dips in September into October and I put it down to SUBtember resulting in a higher sub count which makes sense to me as more Subscribers would result in less people being served ads and thus less ad revenue. This is of course assuming that CCV and Hours watched remain roughly the same.
What is really fascinating about those "dips" is they translate through our ENTIRE economy. Our economy functions in quarters (well, thirds, but corporate overlords call it quarters) and there are HUGE dips in January, March/April, and September.
I think it is a quarter because it's 4 months of the years.
@@0rphros Quarters are 3 months.
I saw YukkoEX, a trans V-tuber also complain about this for a different reason.
[Editing in a TL;DR: the worry is that tags could be used to not run ads against LGBT content, pushing out the viability of LGBT streamers. The Bud Light problem.]
The requirement for tags for policial content also includes language to not talk about "ideology around sexuality, gender, race or religion".
This was seen to opening the door to get any pro LGBT stream forcibly tagged as LGBT because quite often these figures will talk about their lived experience, or have people in chat talk about lived experiences. I believe twitch has had to make a clarifying tweet around people being aloud to talk about lived experiences, but i imagine that will not stop people reporting channels or whatever the mechanism of enforcing tags will be. [Edit Thor talks about this around 26:27]
This language is made less flattering being included beside "talking about legislation [about LGBTQ rights, etc.]" and "talking about war, conflicts and national security issues."
If the UA-cam apocalypse is anything to go buy, this will have a nock-on effect on the viability of LGBT streaming on twitch, I imagine regardless of whether it is illegal by twitch standards. The barrage of complaints will be a nightmare for SOMEONE to deal with and/or the forced LGBT tags will ad-pocalypse specific demographics of creators.
Brands are already targeting and pulling out of brand deals with LGBT creators after the election so I have no doubt on my mind that we especially will be targeted by the adpocalypse
the question would then be:
-if a soldier in a warzone streams and talks about his daily life, is that than not talking about war?
-if a politician starts streaming, can he talk about political topics, he encounters in his daily life? or isnt that then just politics?
- what about a P-star talking about her work? isnt that then also explicit content?
not wanna say, that its not bad for the streamers and there should be a solution. im just thinking how other genres, just would use the same logic to monetize their stuff, that advertisers not wanna have their ads played on.
@spliffingrat5469 i think the difference is that human rights violations are different than something like talking about sex and violence. Its one thing to talk about how you might deal with discrimination for being part of the LGBT community, but it's different when you're talking about stuff like imperialism if you're a veteran.
@@lssjgaming1599 a soldier in an active warzone, talking about his daily life isnt a veteran talking about imperialism.
when a soldier talks about what he does in war, why they do certain things, how many people died that day, then its his lived experience.
you talk about "human rights violations". see how advertisers maybe not wanna have their ads played bevor that?
here on YT stuff like that gets also demonetized, especially if a light is shined on it, like twitch has right now.
you make +18 (non-sexual) content? well, enjoy minimum reach, limited ads and a long term fight for your "right"to those limited ads. (its a privilege btw to get paid for your content by ads. lets never forget that. especially if you have "1st world" audience). so you not only f´ed your own channel, you now show the little amount of people who watch your stuff some scam ads. so only google is making stonks, while the rest suffers lol
@@spliffingrat5469 Twitch actually classifies veterans as a protected class. Like, I used to watch a guy who was banned for hate speech because his comments on U.S. soldiers. Advertisers aren't opposed to politics though. I think that's fairly easy to demonstrate: everyone runs ads at NFL games and they double as recruitment drives for the military. What they're actually averse to is confrontation.
Nice. Love that burrito index. Its up there with the big mac index.
Also on the note of Burger king dropping $5 on advertising in streams. Was this about a year ago when Twitch had "hype chat" where you could essentially pin your message to the top of chat, and the time it stayed there for was based on how much money you put in? (kind of like super chats in UA-cam live streams) .... I remember those, I heard that mods and streamers didnt even have the option to unpin/delete them. That's now evolved into bit cheers with pin ability, but can be taken down by streamer/mods if they want. Sucks to hear DK were being dumb and thinking people would be okay with it.
Man, I am fairly sure UA-cam started recommending me your videos because of my friends, but wow am I glad, because you explain somewhat complex things in an easy to understand way, thank you for all of the info you provide.
Thank you for another deeply educational video, Thor. I actually assumed it was common knowledge that ads drop after December (and common sense, actually). I'm also always very happy to see someone combat the doom-sayers and sensationalists with rationalism and facts.
One thing I've learned out of my time studying and getting my foot into game making. Don't argue with the Data analysis.
Sometimes Chicken Little is the reason we learn more about the sky. Thank you, dumb bird, for driving me to the library.
Like your content dude. Keep up the good work.
I really respect your approach to ads. Ads are a fact of life on the internet, but at least when I see them on your channel I know I'm not missing anything.
But more importantly you're transparent about where the ad revenue goes - watch this ad, pay the mods. Watch this ad, help us buy ferret food. Watch my ads so other people don't get one before the stream even starts.
@Pirate Software
Ad volume:
I doubt this isn't retread for you of all people, but feels very relevant to this, and never got mentioned.
FCC restrictions are based on Decibels, which are not directly related to human perception.
Scummy ads will circumvent this by using a low Decibels, but high LUFS which is contextually much louder to the human ear.
@@litppunka.5732 wow, that’s pretty interesting if true. Guess I’ll follow up thanks for the info.
We (a big shoe brand) were warned by our MSSP and Proofpoint about a targeted effort to attack Twitch advertisers on Oct 25th, and our executives started getting thousands of emails a day and my WAF was getting ddos levels of script kiddie attacks on our ecomm sites. We totally pulled our twitch ads after that mess and are still waiting for it to calm down before restarting.
Can confirm. I work in the ads industry as a secretary for both digital/print for American clients. Lots of shit going on starting around November specifically (11/22/24 i am in pain), December everyone goes on break, January slows the hell down post-holiday.
This is wild to learn about! When I worked for LFP Broadcasting / Hustler as a programming coordinator (basically compiling/titling/synopsizing content for export to major operators like Comcast and Time Warner) we would actually see the exact same drop in content buys (from operators AND their consumers) right around that Dec-Jan-Feb span. It was always - always - our slowest period.
I could have sworn it was earlier, but the CALM Act was passed in 2010! (Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act) But I do remember having to deal with those ads in the late 90s, while I was in middle/high school; I would always have to sit with the mute button ready, unless I was choosing to go to the bathroom during the commercials (and then I could hear them from down the hall!).
I know this has nothing to do with adds but "a day in the life of a ferret rescue center" would be an amazing video.
He streams his ferret rescue 24/7
@@rimprant2796 true but that’s not really what this person is saying. They are looking for a deep dive into the nuts and bolts. We get a pretty thorough rundown from Thor on his streams but it would be cool to get some video action showing “a day in the life”. How the meals are prepared, some of the medical stuff (administering chemo for example) etc
So nice to see a reasonable non-reactionary take, so much better than everyone losing their mind and actually helps me know what's actually going on
Reminds me of that thing with the factory tour in China that I saw. "This sounds a lot like a Black Mirror episode" - "Yes, isn't it wonderful?" - "Black Mirror is supposed to be horror." And I think we're seeing the same with 1984. It's something that's supposed to be avoided, yet we're on a slippery slope towards newspeak and a total loss of privacy.
We created the Torment Nexus from the famous sci-fi book, "Don't Invent the Torment Nexus"!
I was on twitch before amazon, i'm a Partner. I had to quit for health reasons a couple years ago, and could've come back this year but didn't cuz i felt like if i didn't hustle things I didn't want to be a part of there was no space for things I loved.
Using my digital game design degree, playing mods, making pvp builds, gaming, are hopefully gonna make a comeback.
The ad amount thing isn't always a lie. I have gotten 15 ads once but it was still 2 minutes. So 25 ads doesn't sound off. What happens is the more ads on twitch the less time each individual ad takes to play out
Damn son that intro was nice!
Story about language in the first 15 seconds. I used to work as a projectionist, and usually for this big multiplex there were two of us. Often, when something was reaching the end of its run, we'd have something share a theater. Back and forth if they're similar, early for kids films, late for PG13 and R rated films. Cool.
So one day I get a frantic call and run to the projector. A bunch of kids piled into the theater to see the movie Elf. The movie that was lined up... was Bad Santa. And that first 15 seconds is Billy Bob Thornton cursing his brains out, that's how the theater learned the wrong movie was running.
Boy that was fun to fix.
I have a question. as a very small streamer i don't care about the ads revenue, but the ads themself are annoying for peoples who watch me. can i just add the tag "politics" or something like that, and peoples won't get ads anymore while watching me?
Iirc yes, and lots of smaller streamers are doing that already
I'd imagine this could work although the ad revenue has dropped by up to 80% you would still see some ads.
I actually remember someone [it might've been Thor] state that having ads in the middle of the stream is better than pre-rolls.
People rarely stick around to sit through pre-roll ads, but if they're already invested they will tolerate the mid roll ads.
This means higher engagement throughout the stream, and an influx of newer viewers comparatively.
I'd try without the tag for two weeks, and then with the tag for two weeks.
Have an account or friend record how many ads they get per week on average and then compare.
That way you have a data-driven idea of how much ads are affected by having the tag vs not.
To Tichat's original question, for now the answer seems to be yes. Should reduce ads, if not remove them. It could get patched at any time, and Twitch may see it as an exploit. If your not making headlines you SHOULD be safe to do it, but technically dangerous.
But with Rasmachris's pre-rolls vs stream adbreaks. The only problem I see with that is other platforms get stuck with the ad breaks. So youtube viewers 'suffer' for adbreaks 'caused' by Twitch. Probably the best way to do it now, but someone gets the short straw.
I believe this is exactly what asmongold did when twitch forced ads on his streams. And hes not small. I don't watch him so can't say for sure but I think so.
It is a real MASTER CLASS of twitch. I appreciate how you operate on it with full transparency, and full respect for your viewer, great job @Pirate Software!
25:45 I swear, no one is willing to troubleshoot their own problems. They're all like "It's broken! Fix this!" and when asked if they've know how it's broken, they will just say the general thing that isn't helpful at all. People are losing ad revenue but don't know why and come up with crackpot theories or just say "it's the adpocolypse" without actual knowledge of what is happening. Combined with other people giving wrong info, this wrong spiral just keeps getting bigger. Thank you, Thor, for actually testing this.
An example I can give that happened to me recently is that my main computer monitor stopped working in the middle of being in use. 99% of these people would go "it's broken!" and just replace it immediately. I actually wanted to see if it wasn't fully broken. Is it getting power? Yes, the power indicator LED is on. Is it on my pc's end? I have 2 monitors in use and the other is working, so it's not that. Is it one of the ports on my gpu? I swapped which port the two monitors plugged in to, main still has no image. Is it the plug on the monitor? Swapped which cables around on the monitor end, still no image. Instead of Display Port, is the HDMI port working? Plug an HDMI cable in to main monitor and pc. It works. I have now figured out that it's not the whole monitor that's dead, just the Display Port. While I probably will need to replace it before too long, I don't need to replace it now.
People would be surprised at how many things can be easily fixed if they just turned on their brains.
I just got monetized on twitch the day before this drama dropped, I'm glad I'll be able to keep my 1 Cent per hour in ad revenue 😎
i love your "pants" videos
especially on wednesdays and thursdays because i can still have you in the background while gaming
Working my two jobs I see this every year. It's the regular sales curve. Holidays and then school starts/ends will show the rises and dips. As an independent artist, I pump and push ads on the main months and go lean on the others.
That was so informational! Thank you for the clarification.
Some cool info about Bluesky. The 'Feeds' are separate servers maintained by the people who created them. They pay a fee and those within it can donate to help maintain the server. I can see the appeal for ads, but if the ecosystem is building on community support with an active community, I can see Bluesky delaying ads.
"How many viewers does it take to give Thor a burrito?"
"Two viewers on average, apparently."
That ad insert into the broadcast is VERY interesting tec. I wonder if this could be used to do other things, like making the game look entirely different over the broadcast (like covering up nudity or something automatically if the viewer toggles on safe mode for example), or showing the viewers information hidden from the streamer in a chat-vs-streamer type game.
I just want to say thank you so much for breaking this down in the detail you have done. Long live the burrito index!
Most of the platforms serving ads do charge advertisers for ads that are served even if the ad is muted. This also applies to if the tab is out of view or the window is hidden, even when ads are tracking if the tab and ad are viewable. There may be some exceptions, but from my understanding this isn't common.
I just wanted to inject some more testing data into the Turbo vs Sub discussion.
I'm fairly certain I'm the only Turbo user in my friends stream - which I am also subscribed to - and he still gets Turbo ad rev from me. So, a new data point!
Thanks for the Chapters my dude!
It's less a "Ad issue", but rather a "It's not effecting Me!" thing where I "explain it away without knowing the true reason".
A real Adpocalypse would be if large corpos started pulling their advertisements from Twich entirely. It sometimes has a cascade event, especially if the reason for pulling ads is dire enough. The only way i could see an Adpocalypse happening on Twitch would be if the NSFW content on the site started to saturate the site so much that it becomes a Phub-Lite of sorts. They will pull ads if the colloquially named "Twitch Thots" were to become the standard bearer of the platform. Though im sure that Twitch would throw the TT's under the bus before they let advertisers leave on mass.
So glad to hear that it's not going to affect the ferret rescue! Was very worried
"you make me a millionaire, and ill keep paying the employees more. you cant stop me." --- love that you say that. your awesome. keep up the great work.
19:03 I have that feeling with our company. We are contract lab and about 90% of company policies, workflows, procedures etc. is dictated by customers. They say jump, we ask how high. They ask for elephant, we ask what colour? They own us essentialy, but with extra steps.
Thank you for your attention to detail and quality. Your videos are always impressive.🖤🏈🎩
Re Bluesky surviving without ads: I think that Bluesky has a lot higher chances to survive without ads than most other services. Primarily because it's intended as a distributed service where the Bluesky company itself doesn't have a big role with community hosted PDS, proxies, app views, etc
September being lower BPM/viewer makes sense because that's when students are going back to school. Parents are "tapped out" because of buying school supplies, and their children are often the deciding factor on buying fast food. So a .9 to .68 makes sense. October being a dud though, yeah, that's strange, especially since you'd think Halloween themed deals would be taking off.
I think you dismissed the article unfairly - "non-political streamers see normal revenue" and "key advertisers pause spending" are not contradictory statements. And, yeah, the first data point suggests that there is no adpocalypse. Which is a good thing.
Hello.
An additional set of data that might be interesting to look at, if you're tracking this for several years, is the difference in the monthly changes between years.
Like, lets say January 2022 and 2023 both had a drop of 50% in ad revenue. Now, January 2024 instead had a drop of 95% (note: all percentages pulled directly from my rectum)
Stats like that can also show smaller trends that can be used to predict larger ones
When he was talking about New Speak all I could think of was Idiocracy. The guy who would say "Brought to you by Carl's Junior" did it for the money and now creators are saying "unalive" for the money.
It's good that they changed the wording about the LGBTQ+ tags. Even though I still think queer persons need to be able to advocate for their right to exist. Yes, that would be legislation but it's human rights. I don't think we should demonetize people for wanting to legally exist.
Also, I'm not a streamer, so I don't know how this system works exactly, but how would twitch even differentiate between people who have LGBTQ adjacent tags because they talk about those politics and people having the tag because it's their identity. I don't see a way how, without manual classification, they would prevent queer people or allies getting demonetized simply because they have that tag, even without talking about the politics.
18:06 there's an important caveat there: "so long as live video is playing" -- many browsers will pause muted background video elements to save power until you return to the tab.
There is actually a bug I've had with adblockers before that causes ads to keep running like it's just not detecting that I've seen it or something, turning off the adblocker fixes it straight away though.
I hate the idea of ads being displayed in game that the streamer cannot see but I think the technology has potential for new innovative gameplay that incorporates the audience more. Imagine a puzzle or mystery game but only the audience can see certain things so they have to work together with (or against if they want I guess) the streamer to complete the game.
tags is the perfect way to do this, because now I know how to turn off ads
I have mentioned this before, but I just overall hate ads. I don't trust them.
this was some high quality pants, no regrets.
"I'll make you a millionaire"
"I'll just keep paying the employees more. You can't stop me"
:)
6:13 I love how 'burrito stinks' and 'burrito stonks' are the exact same facial expression apart from the tears.
this has to be the fastest 1 hour ever... didnt realise i was listening for an hour!
0:00 : PANNIKK
0:08 : Kalm
What about a $100mil sponso-
I'M SUCKING IT
shoutout devin nash underrated asf
Personally i HATE ads.. all of them! If i click to watch content, i want to watch that content. Not to see ads about stuff i wont buy anyway. Its annoying as hell. And paying a monthly subscription to disable ads is insane to me. That being said, i do understand basically everything runs of money from ads.
Problem with the pre-roll ads is that you can't turn it off from the get go, you need to have a certain amount of people follow you and interact in your streams in order to even turn them off to begin with, so any new Twitch streamer will have to have pre-roll ads turned on which isn't cool ah
"people want to be smarter than they are, so what they believe is true becomes a hysteria."
I have no idea who said this, but I think Thor reworded it so perfectly in this 30 minute video
"They make you a millionaire"
"I'll just keep paying the employees more, you can't stop me" - That even made my heart laugh
I was actually trying to stop UA-cam from recommending me some channels, and some of them cannot be removed. Some ads seem to be unable to be removed, strangely enough (talking about outside of UA-cam)
"impacting every one" no its impacting greedy streamers who cant or dont want to face the consequences of their words and actions.
Lmao calling it splash damage is crazy 😂
Thor mentions Iran in passing on a video talking about the adpocalypse being related to political streams... welp, there goes Novembers ad revenue. Twitch Turbo sounds like... a traditional payment model, where you pay for a membership and you don't see ads.
the counterargument regarding adrev not having dropped at the moment is that the current ads have already been paid or budgeted for
I love when Thor explains things to me. His ability to think thoughts is way above average
I really wish people would learn to take these articles from Richard Lewis with more skepticism. He has a consistent pattern of pushing articles out as fast as possible to get the "scoop"" and often results in incomplete or incorrect information being reported because he prioritizes getting the news out first and doesn't check the information via other sources.
I've never heard of that New World ad panel thing.... that's amazing. Dystopian as all hell, but cool.
Just a support commenter flying by the interwebs 😂 ty for talking about this more informative than some.
Some of us remember a time when the 5-8 channels were all we had to watch and it was all "free" but had no skip ads for 15% of the show.
I noticed the pull back from businesses advertising in Politics, specifically social politics back in June or July Shortly Following an event that should be obvious.
It’s almost as if they wanted nothing to do with the extremes anymore, and so they started propping them up less by advertising less, Or putting themselves in a position where they could be boycotted As easily.
And of course you have people who are utilizing that boycott following a few streamers banning. So that reduce political advertising even further. Basically they all brought that on themselves if they were in politics, it’s their own fault.
The only piece of data I didn’t have is as he’s having here from normal people who don’t get Into extremes in politics. So it’s rather interesting to see that the only people who actually were affected by what I noticed were quite literally people who can’t keep their nose out of other people’s business a.k.a. Politics.
Drama farming, Reactions, Sensationalism, In the past, those are basically what advertisers relied on because they got the most attention. But it’s gotten so extreme. It just seemed like they started to pull back from that several months ago. And it’s only really now being noticed and felt due to a few other incidents.
I have seen that muting a stream doesn’t count towards drops usually, so I’d argue the same would happen towards ads not counting if they work the same
I thought the adpocalypse was gonna be about the sheer number of ads that play, my buddy is a small streamer and has ads turned to minimal and I still get 2-3 15-30 second ads every 5 minutes which is pretty bad.
i love the longform content Thor keep it up, thank you :)
That last thing about being owned by advertisers and losing the freedom really made me think of Angry Video Game Nerd