#iateyourpie

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.

My phone has issues taking pictures at dawn/dusk, but I took this while I was on a walk last night. It was a very pretty evening and it was dark maybe 5 minutes after this photo was taken.

 Work today was easy. No stressful moments to speak of, though I pretty much kept to myself and did my job. I even got compliments on my phone etiquette, so I’ll take it.

 For now I’m just home by a few minutes, managed to eat my dinner, now I’m just watching some Twitch with Spikevegeta and iateyourpie - they are running some Zelda games. Very entertaining to watch a 1 hit death Zelda 3 death run for sure! Literally. They’re using a mod (I assume via emulation) that kills you in one hit and has a death counter. Yet strangely, none are using bottles with ferries in it... that would be a little easier...

 Anyway, for now I’ll keep my entry at that and just relax for a couple hours, then it’s bed time. Then I repeat this same process over the next few days. I do plan on playing some Breath of the Wild this weekend with a buddy though and see how far we can get. Comes out Friday!

 I hope you have all had a great hump day, and may the rest of the work week be great!

Kind of...I recently started reading IAteYourPie’s stream advice blog over at http://www.streambig.net/

Mostly as a means of helping me think of ways to engage with my viewers but also to help prevent the stream from going stale.Considering the struggles I face with the way I play games it’s very easy for me to slip into a determined state where all I want is to beat a certain level and while that isn't a bad thing it means the stream can get a bit boring for everyone else in the meantime.

My main course of action is to either try to start joining into whatever existing conversation is going on and to mentally set myself a limit of about 30-minutes with which to try beating the level before moving on.