Social platforms face an inherent conundrum: advertisers want one thing, users want another, and neither is keen on compromising.
Twitch, the live-streaming platform owned by Amazon, has to be especially careful in navigating the balance of pleasing its users and its advertisers, as its streams don’t include baked-in ad breaks.
If an advertiser wants to run a spot — and Twitch needs them to if it wants to break even in its financials — it must either pause the live action of a stream or find some way to run an ad without interrupting the broadcast.
But viewers don’t want to be interrupted during the height of the action, especially during tense gaming streams.
Twitch, CMO, Rachel Delphin, said: “I really don’t see those things in competition.
“The brands that are here, when you go down to the expo floor, you’ll see lines are forming,”
Delphin pointed to TwitchCon as a forum where its community can engage with brands in a way that’s additive to the experience overall.
Lines did indeed form at TwitchCon’s brand activations, but the real competition between brands and users occurs online. During a panel led by Twitch ad product managers, the team candidly shared the challenges of being pushed and pulled between both parties.
Simply put, users want to be distracted by ads as little as possible, especially during peak moments of a stream. Meanwhile, advertisers want to have a user’s full attention, ideally by fully taking over the stream with an interruptive midroll ad.
Streamers, meanwhile, find themselves stuck in the middle, trying to satisfy both their audience and the source of their ad revenue.
“An advertiser that’s willing to pay a premium video CPM for a 30-second, non-skippable ad is expecting a highly interruptive experience; that’s the value proposition,” said Mike Minton, chief monetization officer at Twitch.
Twitch aims to bridge the gap by offering static ads that appear in different locations on a stream without completely pausing the action. The problem is, brands won’t pay a premium for these placements.
Twitch’s ad product team has continued to experiment with formats that brands will pay top dollar for and users won’t rage over. One teased during the panel places streamers and ads side by side in equally sized boxes while playing audio from the ad.
At TwitchCon, the platform also announced that moderators will be able to see upcoming ads and delay them by up to five minutes — a feature that was previously only available to streamers.
“What we try to do is, if we’re going to run an interruptive ad experience, have the streamer run it at the best possible time,” Minton said.
This story first appeared on Campaign UK.
