It's a chicken and egg problem where there is not much point in building your own whizbang streaming platform and have no one come to it.
Twitch is getting increasingly ad-nnoying and you can _ad_ barely _ad_ watch _ad_ it _ad_ an _ad_ ymore.
That said that's still where you get the viewers and that's what people will pick. The ad-revenue sharing being the carrot here which will probably mean it's going to be successful for a lot longer.
I run an adblocker but I'm sympathetic to Twitch's plight here.
Or at least I was until they started interrupting streams in the middle of the action with no human input to show ads.
When the broadcaster clicks the ad button, it's a good time to run ads. They're probably taking a break anyway, there's nothing critical or even interesting happening, so watching some ads is fine.
But randomly interrupting in the middle of a conversation or right as the good part hits to show an ad shows that the Twitch management no longer understands or gives a shit about their platform.
mid stream randomly, you get thrown 30+ seconds of ads, great if you were having a conversation with the host.
then if the stream breaks, refresh, new set of ads.
pop the popout player, ads.
It's totally rooted. The suits run the show and they're milking the cow. The only reason they're going so hard at it, I speculate, is that they're being hit by big DMCA fees.
I can't otherwise explain with logic why they'd run ads literally on DJ streams with thousands of viewers.
It is amazing how fast these things change. Less than a decade ago when asked about ads and sustainability, the folks at Justin tv said the cost per stream viewer isn’t very high and one ad every hour more than covers all costs. Granted this was before high definition high frame rate became the norm but still...
less than a decade ago I was making almost half as much money per month as I make now and it was totally ok, now I can barely get by on what I'm making, where there may not be inflation of the economy there may still be inflation of our wants - not to say that is the complete reason for the increase of ads, only a contributing factor.
That's been a feature since the Justin.tv days. Some broadcasters choose to automatically run an ad every 30 minutes, for example. Twitch's broadcaster UI supports this, and has for a very very long time.
Opting in is a different story, and I don't object to an individual broadcaster choosing to do this.
If you stream speedrun attempts, a block of ads every 30 minutes probably isn't going to cause viewers to miss anything of significance, so it's probably safe to flip that switch. Of course, when the ads show up at the wrong time in that case, it's probably very upsetting.
But if you stream a show with banter between hosts, and you already manually run ads every hour while preparing for the next segment of the show, and you still get interrupted in the middle of the dialogue by an ad? That's horrible.
If you stream a competitive game (DotA, LoL, Overwatch, Warzone, etc), and your amazing comeback from behind gets interrupted by an ad, you're going to lose both short term and long term revenue.
Long term because viewers will get frustrated and leave. Short term because viewers seeing a great play are more likely to donate and gift subscriptions to celebrate the moment. But if they don't actually see it, you can't get that hype train started, and you lose out and so does Twitch.
Twitch is getting increasingly ad-nnoying and you can _ad_ barely _ad_ watch _ad_ it _ad_ an _ad_ ymore.
That said that's still where you get the viewers and that's what people will pick. The ad-revenue sharing being the carrot here which will probably mean it's going to be successful for a lot longer.