So a couple days ago I decided to turn down my ad frequency on Twitch because everybody complains about it, even if there are guides by big twitch streamers saying its fine. Well, today Twitch just implemented an "automatic length" feature that means I can't turn it down anymore.
The way it works is: show more ads, get a better earnings percentage. 30% by default, 55% if you exceed a threshold of ads per minute. It was a nudge to encourage you to crank ad frequency up, and like I said, I found guides by bigger Twitch streamers like "put it as high as it will go, you have nothing to lose."
(This is a generalization: the idea was that a huge block of ads every hour was less obtrusive than smaller breaks closer together, because longer uninterrupted chunks was better while still getting you a good earnings rate.)
So I cranked it to max as instructed: three minutes of ads every hour. 55% share percentage. And in every single stream, literally half my viewership would complain whenever they'd hit a giant block of ads.
Twitch had two sliders: ad length and ad frequency, and you could adjust them independently to find the right sweet spot and still hopefully nail that 55% earnings rate. So, I tried to find a way to turn down ad length while also not getting to be too annoying about ad frequency.
But hitting that 55% is hard. Twitch wants you to watch so many ads, friends. The shorter the ad breaks, the more frequently they want you to have them. Cutting ad breaks shorter by 30 seconds means seeing a break 25% sooner.
3 minutes of ads every hour then becomes 2 minutes of ads every 30 minutes. That's not a very fair ratio, and I think that's the point. Again: they want you to max this stuff out, not be kind to your viewers.
I figured we'd try 150 seconds of breaks (down from 180) every 45 minutes. Just a nudge down from where it was.
Now... I can't do that. They introduced this "automatic length" setting, which removes your ability to set length/frequency independently even if you turn it off. Two sliders become one.
If I want to hit that 150 second break threshold that previously kept my 55% share rate, it now FORCES it down to 30% earnings, because it only calculates per hour now. There is no "150sec/45min" setting anymore, just "150sec/hour".
On the other hand, they will GLADLY let you crank it up to 3 minutes of ads every 8 minutes of stream. No problems there. By all means, make 40% of your stream an ad break. We don't care. Go nuts.
Apologies in advance to all my viewers but I think Twitch literally took the tools out of my hands just now to make this better. There is no way to set it to less than "3 minutes per hour" and still earn that 55% anymore.