Twitch does do this with its SureStream ads and its much worse for a livestream than a video since with a video you can resume where you left off after the ad finished whereas for a livestream you just lose what was happening during the ad.
Twitch also removed the ad-free benefit from twitch prime.
Such poor behavior creates gaps in the canopy, providing sunlight for other services to grow. If you don't like how a service is treating you, switch to a better one and make the case to your peers why they should do likewise.
A healthy internet is ultimately up to us to build and maintain.
The issue is that an alternate service can only grow in the gaps if it has a viable business model: so far, monetizing internet services for the general public without advertising and tracking is a mostly-unsolved problem, despite interesting efforts like Brave.
> monetizing internet services for the general public without advertising and tracking is a mostly-unsolved problem
I feel like that's not a real problem. Or, maybe only a problem for services that care more about having a ton of users than being profitable and sustainable.
There are quite a few services (SmugMug, Vimeo, NetFlix, etc.) that charge money, don't have advertisements, and are doing just fine.
It's weird that so many web companies decide to go the sleazy advertisement/tracking/malware route rather than just charge money for the services they provide.
> It's weird that so many web companies decide to go the sleazy advertisement/tracking/malware route rather than just charge money for the services they provide.
You will find very quickly how reluctant people are to pay for anything despite a few cultural-phenomenon-level exceptions like Netflix.
I'm amazed how many people, like my own coworkers making $100k+, listen to Spotify all day every day yet will endure advertisement after advertisement in their stream of music instead of paying $10/month. If someone isn't even going to pay for Spotify despite it being a central part of their day to day experience, GG to your little service.
I think advertising has played a major hand in shepherding us into this position that divorced us from the idea of paying for content we enjoy. There is going to have to be a major cultural change to bring us back into a healthy relationship with content.
One common response to this is "well, maybe everyone should be hobbyists again making content for free," but surely we can find a better middleground than structuring things such that we depend on people toiling away in their freetime to produce the content we happen to want. For example, I'd rather my favorite content providers be able to feed themselves working on this content. We both benefit: I get to enjoy more content. Depending on hobby work doesn't get us there.
> You will find very quickly how reluctant people are to pay for anything despite a few cultural-phenomenon-level exceptions like Netflix.
That's absolutely not true, though. People buy stuff all the time. Clothing, shoes, sporting goods, dishes, food, housewares, books, DVDs, etc.
The "freemium" approach Spotify takes is a poor example because they're not charging for their real service of music streaming, but instead to get rid of advertisements. They've moved their own goalposts, and the question isn't "Is streaming music worth $10 a month?" but "Is it worth $10 a month to get rid of this commercial?" If the options were "Pay $10 to stream music" or "Listen to nothing," the results might be a lot different.
> One common response to this is "well, maybe everyone should be hobbyists again making content for free," but surely we can find a better middleground than structuring things such that we depend on people toiling away in their freetime to produce the content we happen to want. For example, I'd rather my favorite content providers be able to feed themselves working on this content. We both benefit: I get to enjoy more content. Depending on hobby work doesn't get us there.
I'm not making that argument, and you're setting up a false dichotomy. There's no reason content creators need to use advertisements and can't charge for their content instead. It worked fine for music and movies for over a hundred years, and books have been using that model for hundreds of years before that.
I think the world of consumption has changed though. People expect things (music, games, etc) to be free and balk at paying for them. Why would they when there is likely someone offering something comparable for free but supported by ads?
Maybe you could ship them a real item as part of the service somehow
I'd never pay $10 for a character in a game, but I'd happily pay $15 for a plastic toy that coincidentally unlocks something in a game I was enjoying anyway
That's not what Spotify is doing. The choice is pay us cash or pay us with your attention by watching ads.
Why go to work, earn cash with your attention, and pay for Spotify when you can directly monetize your attention on-demand in real-time at the rate you consume? That's what advertising allows.
That's a very good observation. I think it's true that having the free option changes the context very much.
There are people who pay for paid password managers when free alternative products available. I myself pay for a number of services (very reasonably priced) when I could have used free alternatives. The difference is the guys I pay don't offer a free edition without ads and nonsense like that. They just build a great software and ask to pay for their effort.
It's not just removing advertisements. Spotify Premium lets you listen to any song they have anytime you want. I thought the free version only let you listen to their pregenerated stations?
> One common response to this is "well, maybe everyone should be hobbyists again making content for free," but surely we can find a better middleground than structuring things such that we depend on people toiling away in their freetime to produce the content we happen to want. For example, I'd rather my favorite content providers be able to feed themselves working on this content.
If you do it as a hobby, it's not toiling. It becomes toiling when you do it as work, especially if you have to please advertisers instead of making the content you love.
The distribution of content might be quite different - but remember that ads aren't free - they're just another middleman that has to be paid, priced in in the cost of goods, a net drain from the point of view of the consumers (on first approximation at least).
Vimeo was so well positioned to beat out youtube back in the day. Stage6 had just shut down and vimeo was offering HD while youtube was stuck with low res. But then they made the mistake of banning video game content for not being artsy enough which led to youtube jumping in popularity.
This is actually interesting right now because Microsoft, Google and Facebook all seem to be trying to get into streaming. I would definitely like to see more competition in this space so that Twitch doesn't get complacent.
It's hard to know until they perform the bait and switch. It's certainly not the only reason that brand loyalty is dead, but it's one that's often on my mind. I don't have any confidence that my trust in a brand will mean anything in the long term. A new service exists? Well, it might be nice right now, but if I let myself rely on it the service will become slightly worse over the years.
It's the streamer who decides when the ads should show (this is because those ads hide the stream, so they should be used when nothing is happening). If they never tell Twitch to show ads, SureStream ads won't appear.
I watch at least one streamer who runs ads in her breaks, she is a partner. So does she have a to specifically select those surestream ads? Maybe they only show in certain geographic locations?
Twitch is running two kinds of ads, one type is "normal" and can be blocked by ublock, the other one is weird - it's definitely not just spliced into the video stream either, as far as I remember (I have Amazon Prime so I don't see ads), but ublock also wasn't able to block it.
However, I would argue that it is not actually worse for several reasons. For one, the streamer decides exactly when and how to play ads - so if the ad timing bothers you, you're going to start watching someone else, which in turn creates an incentive to keep streams ad-free or at least run ads at specific times.
The second reason is that the usage pattern of Twitch is different. I go to twitch (if it's a livestream) to actually watch the content, whereas I use YouTube in many cases like I would use an article, skipping through videos and back and forth looking for a specific part or specific information, and if the information isn't there quickly trying the next video. This workflow gets completely destroyed by ads. To the point where if YouTube would somehow force me to watch ads, I would simply stop using it except for the 2-3 weekly videos I actually plan to watch beforehand.
I don't think Twitch Prime has the ad-free benefit anymore, they moved that into Twitch Turbo. The ads are also definitely stitched into the HLS playlist as segments, so even if you were to block them you would see a black screen for the duration of the ad, although Twitch does seem to be doing something where if a segment fails to load it tries to load the next one a few seconds later, so you might only see the black screen for 5s or so.
You may be ad-free for another reason such as a grandfathered twitch prime that will expire when it next renews, twitch turbo, or a subscription to a channel that opts-in to the ad-free sub benefit. You might also just be in a region or demographic where ads aren't being bought, so you wouldn't get any then.
Weird, I saw the ads get through for a few days but then they stopped again. I watch twitch vods pretty regularly still, but I guess I stick to a few channels and don't jump around; maybe the specific channels I watch didn't enable this type of ad.
Maybe uMatrix is blocking them somehow? I've never seen an ad, even on channels I don't follow or subscribe to. My rulesets are very strict, but you're right, if they really come through the video stream I don't know how I'm blocking it.
Maybe you buy a lot of subscriptions and currency? I bet they avoid annoying their most profitable users. While it might have been coincidental, I never got ads until I unsubbed from the vast majority of streamers I follow. Same for other things like gifted subs. I used to receive a ton of gifted subs until I started lowering my sub count. They are obsessed with performance metrics. Big spenders have a very different experience.
Now, whenever I get an ad, I immediately close twitch and find something on YT/Mixer to watch. I'm training their algorithms to leave me alone.
I get no ads on Twitch, and I currently don’t have Twitch Prime or any subscriptions. I’ve spent maybe 50 bucks on Twitch in the 3-4 year lifespan of my account. I’m running Vivaldi (which uses Chromium) with uBlock Origin, Ghostery (I know), and HTTPS Everywhere, on MacOS.
I get ads when I use Twitch, with the same account, on a stock installation of Chrome (which I use as my backup browser for when I don’t want to figure out which extension is breaking a website). So it’s not related to my account, location, etc.
Twitch also removed the ad-free benefit from twitch prime.