 Let's face it, Twitch has a huge problem right now at the way they do ads. Nobody wants ads in their stream, especially the way that Twitch does them, but this is our reality right now, until Twitch makes some changes. And I'm not going to hold my breath on that one, so I've spent the last few months playing around with a number of different ways to make it more manageable as a streamer. I believe the three-part solution I've come up with works best for my own stream, and I hope it helps you manage your ads more sensibly as well. How do you run ads on Twitch without upsetting your viewers? Make sure you and your viewers know when the ads are happening. Reassure them that they won't be missing any crucial content or conversation, and give them a reason to stay while ads are running. As an affiliate on Twitch, you're faced with what used to be an impossible choice. Allow pre-roll ads to run or run mid-roll ads. I've always preferred mid-roll ads since I feel that pre-roll ads are far more damaging for growth, and now that Twitch has increased the revenue share at 55% when you run mid-roll ads the right way, that really sealed the deal for me. So I've been testing a number of different things and I've finally arrived at what I think is a sensible solution, so I'm going to share it. We'll get into how to incentivize viewers to stay in a moment, but first, let's go through how I have the ad manager set up to run just the right amount of ads to both completely disable pre-roll ads and also qualify for the 55% revenue share. Let's start by going to the ad manager in the first place. To get here, go to your creator dashboard in Twitch, click settings on the left, choose affiliate from the menu, and then scroll down to the section for ads. Before I show you the settings I suggest, I'm briefly going to describe why I've chosen the ad volume and frequency that I've chosen. In order to unlock the 55% revenue share from ads, you need to average three minutes of ads per hour of your stream. You might be tempted to just run one three-minute block of ads per hour, and that would technically work if all you cared about was the revenue share, but we also want to completely eliminate pre-roll ads. Running a scheduled ad will eliminate pre-rolls for a certain amount of time, and the longer ad you run, the longer it disables pre-roll ads, but only to a point. Running a one and a half minute ad disables pre-rolls for 30 minutes, but running a two-minute ad doesn't disable it for any more than 30 minutes, so there's no point in running more than a minute and a half of ads at one time. The best ad frequency ends up being 90 seconds of ads every 30 minutes. That'll qualify you for both the 55% share of ad revenue and also completely disable pre-rolls. That said, how do we set this up? First, on the affiliate page under ads, make sure the toggle for ads is on. Make sure the radio button for disable pre-roll ads when I run ads is selected, and make sure pre-roll notifications and stream display ads toggles are both turned on. You also want to scroll up and make sure the toggle for ad for reviewing is turned on under this subscription section. Now, to set the timing for the scheduled ads, go back down to the ads section and click the ad manager area. Slide the ad spacing slider to 30 minutes, the ad length slider to one minute and 30 seconds, and the slider for start delay to one minute. This way your first ads will run pretty much right away while you're still starting up the stream, and you also avoid letting your average fall below 3 minutes per hour if you happen to end stream right before ads are supposed to run again. Finally, make sure the ad schedule toggle is turned on, and then click save changes in the bottom right. Next, and possibly most importantly, we want to make sure we know when ads actually run. Fortunately, the Twitch API fires an event when this happens, and Streamerbot is set up to allow you to trigger an action when this event happens. The action I use does a number of things, but the simplest and most important in my perspective is playing an audible alert when ads run. As the streamer, this lets you know that some of your viewers are facing ads right now, so you may want to pause your game, delay any important conversation you might be having, or whatever else you might need to do to prevent your viewers from feeling like they missed out on something important. I also make sure a chat message goes out explaining that ads are about to run and that you'll be right back. This helps your mods and subscribers also know that ads are running and that they should try to keep chat engaged while the stream is essentially paused. Regardless of what you want this action to do, it's simple to wire it up to the event that fires when ads run. Go to the platforms tab, choose twitch, events, and on the general tab you'll see the add run event. Choose your action here, and you're all set. Now, knowing that ads are running is one thing, but how do we give viewers a heads up? Well, since we're set up to run them on a schedule, it should be simple enough to just use a timer for this, so that's what we'll do. We won't worry about the very first ad that runs at the one minute mark, but after that one triggers, we can simply set a 28 minute delay in our action and then send a message that ads will be coming in about two minutes. I say about because from my testing I found that the ads seem to have a bit of a flexible window when they actually run. Sometimes it's up to 30 seconds early. I'm not sure exactly what causes this variability, but it is what it is, so it's hard to nail down the time with extreme precision, but we can get pretty close by reducing our 28 minute delay to 27 and a half minutes. To do this, we go into the action we have set up and add a 1,650,000 millisecond delay, and then a chat message saying the ads are on the way. I personally also show an ads running soon text element on my overlay. Then when the event fires again, I clear that element from my overlay. So now we have an action that alerts us when ads are running and then also fires off a two minute warning for the next batch of ads. So how do we keep our viewers around while ads are actually running? Personally, I haven't found that people actually leave if they know the ads are coming and they know they're not really missing anything critical. I've gone through my analytics and just don't really see the drops that I see people being so doomy and gloomy about. I just don't see anything in the data to support the claim that running ads makes viewers leave, at least not with this frequency of ads. That being said, we want to do everything we can to keep people entertained during this time. So what can we do? We can chat. Do you have a favorite chat based game? Do you have a bank of would you rather type questions? You got some other kind of engaging chat stuff? Have your action run one of those things too? I've personally been using VR Flads Champion of the Hill game, which looks great to those of your viewers that can still see it, but it also works as a chat only game and it takes about 80 seconds to play, so it's perfect for a minute and a half ad window. I've seen others do a who's that Pokemon game, some kind of chat based roulette game, fire off a question of the day or a number of other things. Sky's the limit. It's important to mention that if any triggered action for these games contains delays, these delays need to be factored into that 27 and a half minute delay that we added into our action. Otherwise, the two minute warning is going to get thrown off. For example, the Champion of the Hill game takes about 8.8 seconds, so my delay is 1,562,000, which is 88,000 milliseconds shorter than the original 1,650,000 millisecond delay. Hopefully this will help you feel more confident running ads in your Twitch stream. I really do believe this is far better than running pre-roll ads and driving away all your potential new viewers. Let me know what you think in the comments and don't forget to like this video and share it with a streamer you think needs to hear about this technique. I'll leave an import code in the description with a simple version of all of this to get you started. Now go check out this video about one of my other favorite things to do with Streamer Bot.