We discussed recently that Twitch, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say Amazon, has openly declared war on ad-blockers with their platform.
The results have been an absolute disaster for both streamers and viewers, with the only party arguably coming ahead being Twitch themselves.
Heaps of advertisements, often at three minutes per segment, come sporadically no matter what is occurring on the screen; this is due to Twitch, not the streamers themselves (unless they take an active hand in ensuring pre-rolls are off by running ads themselves in between matches).
This is arguably the most unwatchable Twitch has become: missing crucial plays in monumental tournaments, missing your streamer ace the round with a Deagel and ten HP, or simply being forced to watch six garbage fast-food ads in a row when you’re trying to vibe with your streamer becomes infinitely frustrating, fascinatingly quick.
Twitch themselves have already shown that they’re escalating the war against ad blockers, shifting their code sporadically to ensure whatever trackers being filtered against can be circumnavigated, because who doesn’t want to see cheaply-made burgers every ten minutes on every stream?
There are three ways you can fight back, although notably, only one is without dropping into Twitch’s ploy.
First, you can continue to play cat and mouse with Twitch developers, updating uBlock Origin or whatever your preferred antiseptic against advertisements is, updating constantly and hoping that when Twitch updates, you won’t need to be too far behind. The current leader of that fight is found within the following Reddit post that is, at this time, still undefeated. Do not presume that this method is lasting.
This, and it sucks to say, is a losing battle. Inevitably, you’ll be behind in updates as they favor Twitch’s development, and you will inevitably be barraged with adverts. There’s an admirable notion to sticking it to the man, of course, but don’t expect to ultimately win.
The second method is subscribing to every streamer you want to watch; if you’re working from home (as millions are on an international scale during this pandemic) and Twitch is your go-to companion for yet another exhausting day of tapping Excel spreadsheets, this quickly becomes unviable.
If you watch a single streamer, subscribing makes sense; you’ll frequent one channel, and $5 per month can ensure that you dodge all ads that aren’t embedded onto the stream itself.
If Twitch has become your social hub during the pandemic, however, and you find yourself typically watching more than one streamer a day, then it’s time to talk about biting the bullet that is Twitch Turbo.
As you’ll find in the discussion of the first link, Twitch Turbo is a bit of a frustrating concept for many viewers; it will not block all advertisements; specifically, those embedded within the stream itself. Those advertisements can be seen during Twitch’s Thursday night football or other Twitch special streams. The rule of thumb is this: subscribing to Twitch Turbo removes Twitch’s advertisements that they run on top of streams, yet can not remove advertisements embedded within the streams themselves (as Twitch doesn’t run that content).
If you bouncing around streams, Twitch Turbo, frankly speaking, is your saving grace at $8.99 per month, meaning that it is cheaper than holding subs to two channels at once.
In an ideal world, this discussion wouldn’t need to happen.
As Mixer is now out of the picture and YouTube Live manages to suffer from more than YouTube itself is, plus whichever demographic the Facebook streaming service is attempting to reach, Twitch is pretty clear of competition for the meantime. You can either get with the program and manage what is in front of us, or discard Twitch until they manage to stop blocking entire streams for the thousandth mediocre burger commercial of the day.
