Twitch wants to let viewers snooze some ads

One of the worst parts of Twitch is watching a creator and getting interrupted by an ad during a key moment of their stream. It’s also annoying to start watching a creator and having to deal with three minutes of ads before the service will let you through to the stream.

Twitch is looking to fix both of those things. In a blog post, the company announced a slew of new features for creators. In addition, it also revealed that it was taking a new approach to pre-roll and mid-roll ads.

The first improvement that the company is making is to disable pre-roll ads for creators who run at least three minutes of ads per hour. The company is also bringing Picture-by-Picture to the “majority” of pre-roll ads.

In the first half of this year, we’re making two changes to improve the way ads work for viewers and channels: First, we’re updating the way disabling pre-rolls works for channels. Running three minutes of ads per hour in any way will disable all pre-rolls — they no longer have to be split into 90-second ads every 30 minutes.  Second, we’re applying our Picture-by-Picture experience to the majority of pre-rolls that viewers do see. 

If you’ve ever been watching a key moment of a stream, only to be rudely interrupted by a mid-roll ad, Twitch is looking to fix that too. The company says that it is “exploring ways to give communities a heads up when ads are coming and the ability to snooze video mid-roll ads.”

The company is also trying to help creators make the ad experience better for their audience. Twitch said that “we have heard from you all that it can be difficult to know when an ad is about to run, thereby making it difficult to prepare yourself and your community for the interruption. We will make changes to Ads Manager to help you have more visibility and control over when the ads roll.”

Twitch says that it also plans to launch Twitch Turbo, which will provide an ad-free viewing experience, later this year.