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Innovations in streaming ads—and opportunities for marketers

by | Aug 24, 2021 | Marketing, Public Relations

Like most other livestreaming services, Twitch also offers its users advertising options where brands and corporations can promote their products or services. Twitch has traditional ad placements for the platform, such as banners and pre-roll videos, and companies can also partner with influencers on the platform. Twitch itself is most well-known by people interested in gaming, but it has a bigger reach and it’s often overlooked by businesses that don’t quite understand how the platform works, or if they should be promoting their solutions on the platform in the first place.

Introducing new features

Recently, the company announced that it would start testing a new type of ad format for livestreams, which seems to be less disruptive than the current pre-roll and mid-roll ads that generally take over the entire stream. These new ads are titled Stream Display Ads and are going to be showing up either around or under people’s streams. The great thing about these types of ads is they don’t stop the viewers from seeing or hearing what’s going on during the streams themselves. The company stated that this new experimental feature is currently optional for Twitch users, while also showing different variations of these new types of ads.

Although users won’t be able to minimize or close the ads while they’re showing, they will only last for up to 10 seconds. According to the information released by Twitch, the ads will be showing up to viewers automatically, but the company promised that they wouldn’t be too frequent, as there would not be more than eight ads in an hour. However, that amount can fluctuate based on demand.

User criticism

Unfortunately, despite the positive news for both streamers and viewers, plenty of people are still upset because this new feature doesn’t change the pre-roll ads, which start to play the second a stream begins. This has been the source of plenty of annoyances for both streamers and viewers, both of whom want to communicate with their audience or their favorite streamers from the very beginning of a stream. Another reason why plenty of viewers and streamers take issue with the pre-roll ads is that a number of streamers have also noticed that the bounce rate is incredibly high with those types of ads.

Additionally, some of the platform’s streamers also didn’t take to celebrating the addition of the new types of ads on Twitch, because they only see it as the platform finding a new way to add more ads. This means both Twitch as a platform, as well as advertisers, will be making more money through advertising, instead of finding a way to fix the issue with the ads the users already have.

Although this is a positive step in terms of new types of ads being introduced in livestreaming, there are still plenty of changes that should be made, and live streaming platforms should be listening to their user base to make changes accordingly.

Mike Paffmann
Mike Paffmann is CEO of Virgo-PR.

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