Twitch Adding Some Fairly Major Updates

The #ADayOffTwitch movement seems to have been actually effective in getting Twitch to start listening.

Twitch finally seems somewhat willing to listen to creators and viewers on their platform. A couple emails have been sent out earlier today to creators outlining changes to two things; more control over ads for creators, and the possibility to refund recurring subscriptions for viewers.

We’ve Been Asking For This For a While

Twitch streamers will now have a bit more control over the ads on their site. Most notably, with certain settings turned on, pre-roll ads will stop playing when viewers join the stream. This is fairly noteworthy, as statistics show that viewership can end up dropping thanks to pre-roll ads as viewers, especially those that are new and unfamiliar to your stream, often won’t want to sit through an ad before getting to content that they are unsure of.

Some of the new settings include being able to change the amount of time between ads, the ad length, and how long from the start of stream until the ads start playing. There is also a button to snooze a scheduled ad.

I did previously mention the fact that you can remove pre-roll ads, but there is unfortunately a catch (as there always seems to be with Twitch). You cannot manually disable pre-roll ads. In order to get them turned off, you need to set at least 90 seconds of ads per 30 minutes in the ad schedule. At least it’s a start, but even then I’m not a fan of mid-roll ads, especially not in that amount. And frankly, for most creators, the ad revenue is pretty the smallest chunk of their income. So it’s pretty obvious Twitch is doing that in order to maintain their income from ads. So for now, it seems very unlikely that we will get that kind of control in the near future. But one can hope.

Was This Not a Thing Before?

In slightly less exciting news, Twitch will now be allowing refunds on recurring subscriptions. Though it isn’t something that will be a guarantee, but rather a case-by-case kind of basis. Honestly, given my background working customer service for one of the major gaming manufacturers, this likely was a internal policy where if you reached out they may have given you a refund, but now is moving that policy to more of a public access type of thing. Can’t say for sure though as I, nor anyone here at Gamer’s Charisma, have ever worked for Twitch. So take anything I said after the third sentence of this paragraph with a grain of salt.

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TheCyberQuake

Part-time Creator, Full-Time Idiot. Main Creator for the Gamer's Charisma socials and other affiliated sites. I've loved video games since early youth, especially towards the Nintendo side of things. More recently been diving into the VR side of gaming as well.

http://thecyberquake.com