Skip to main content

    Twitch’s new video ads can avoid ad blockers

    Twitch’s new video ads can avoid ad blockers

    Share this story

    Amelia Krales

    Twitch is the next big name to take on ad blocking. Starting today, it’s rolling out a new ad format that’s supposed to be harder to skip. Twitch says the change will “reduce the efficacy” of ad blockers — seemingly leaving some wiggle room there under the assumption that someone’s going to find a way around them.

    To block ads, Twitch is basically doing the exact same thing that Facebook did: it’s going to begin making ads look — from a code perspective — just like regular content on the site. Twitch is doing that by taking control of ad delivery. Rather than having advertisers deliver their own video streams, Twitch is going to handle it. That’ll make ads look like any other stream.

    Twitch claims it totally doesn’t care if you block ads

    Twitch says this decision isn’t really about ad blocking — in fact, it goes out of its way to make itself sound like the cool relative who doesn’t care if you smoke in the house, calling itself “agnostic” to the use of ad blocking software. “You are free to use it, or not, as you see fit,” Twitch writes.

    But the reality is that ad blocking almost certainly figured into this decision. Twitch acknowledges in a blog post about the change that it is “well aware that many dedicated Twitch viewers” use ad blockers. And that means lost money for both Twitch and the people streaming on Twitch. Its business doesn’t function if a large percentage of visitors are blocking ads; and chances are, with such a tech-savvy crowd, Twitch sees quite a few.

    Facebook’s unblockable ads have been mostly effective

    Facebook saw some pushback from the ad-blocking community in the immediate aftermath of its move to unblockable ads, but that’s largely died down. And while ad blockers have at times managed to foil Facebook, Facebook has largely stayed ahead of them. Adblock Plus, for instance, isn’t currently able to block Facebook’s ads.

    It’s likely that Twitch will see the same back and forth. Given its talk about being “agnostic” to ad blocking, it’s possible that it won’t try as hard to subvert these extensions. But it also says that moving to its own ad infrastructure is about attaining “broader reach and more reliable delivery” of ads, both of which are defeated by ad blockers.

    The change is also being made so that Twitch can begin selling ads on its own, rather than relying on third parties, according to Variety. That means that there isn’t a big switch that’s going to be flipped all at once. Instead, Twitch is going to be rolling out this new, harder-to-block format, which it’s calling SureStream, little by little.