 Streamerbot has just added some new ways to help manage ads in version 0.2.3, so it's time to refresh our way of dealing with ads on Twitch. We'll get to the new method of giving a heads up for ads with Streamerbot in a moment, but first I'd like to talk about the changes for ads on the Twitch side. It's still true that Twitch affiliates can earn a 55% ad revenue split by running at least 3 minutes of ads per hour. You can now disable pre-roll ads for up to a whole hour at a time by running a 3 minute block of ads, which changed sometime last year. You used to only be able to disable pre-rolls for a maximum of a half hour. That caused me to recommend a 90 second ad break every 30 minutes. Now as long as you still hit that 3 minute per hour mark, you can run any combination of ad length and frequency you want and still get the full revenue share and totally disable pre-rolls. You can do 3 minutes of ads every hour. You can do 1 minute of ad every 20 minutes, 2 minutes of ad every 40 minutes. The beauty of this new setup is that it doesn't matter what frequency you set anymore. The triggers will still work fine and you won't have to change any delays or timers or anything. It should just work. Overall, I recommend specifying your own ad frequency so you know what to expect. Let's look at how to set this all up in Twitch. You can access these ad manager settings in their new place under the Creator dashboard, then Monetization, then Ad. You do need to be an affiliate or partner with Twitch to access these settings. You want to click the toggle at the top to activate scheduled ads. Make sure the selection next to pre-roll ads is set to Disable pre-roll ads whenever on ads. Skip over the Ads Manager section for the time being. We'll get to that in just a second. The pre-roll notifications toggle is pretty unimportant since our strategy will eliminate pre-rollers entirely except for the very first minute or so of stream. I suggest that you leave the stream display ads toggle turned on if that setting shows up for you as it does increase ad revenue and these ads don't interrupt the stream. They're the ones that show up as a little banner underneath or whatever. It's totally up to you though. Now go back to the Ads Manager section and click to open the Ad Management page. At the top, you'll be able to set your ad minutes per hour. I recommend putting this at 3 minutes per hour or higher to fully disable pre-rolls and grant you the full 55% revenue split from ads. Next you'll see the toggle for automatic ad length and frequency. I recommend turning this off and setting your ad length and frequency manually. Once toggled off, two more sliders will appear. The second slider lets you set the cadence of your ad. You can set it to 1.5 minutes every 30 minutes, 3 minutes every 60 minutes, but it's entirely up to you. I may switch to 2 minutes every 40 myself. This slider will always respect the total ad minutes per hour that you set up with the slider at the top. The third slider is a start delay to set how long Ad Manager will wait before running the first scheduled ad. I personally have this set to 1 minute so that you can get that first ad break going right off the bat and disable pre-rolls right away. The actions we set up in Streamerbot should work regardless, so this is really up to you. On the right side, you may see another new toggle for auto snooze ads. This is an experimental feature that is meant to automatically snooze ads during a raid or a hype train. In my own stream, I've really only noticed it working once, but I haven't really done any focused testing around it. Let me know in the comments if you've seen this in action. Next, there's a section of settings for ad notifications. There's a newer feature for streamers, and now mods, that will show an upcoming ads notification and countdown right in chat above the chat prompt. It's a great new feature that helps make it just a little bit easier to notice that ads are about to run. Make sure the ad notifications in chat toggle is on, and if you want your mods to get this notification as well, toggle the ad notification in chat for mods toggle. Finally, make sure the ad schedule toggle at the bottom is turned on, and then press the save changes button at the bottom. Okay, we're all set up on the Twitch side. There's really no way to not run ads on Twitch, so the main goal is to manage ads in a way that doesn't upset your viewers. Nothing worse than having people come in and just complain about ads the whole time. To run ads without upsetting your viewers, you need to do three things. Make sure you and your viewers know when ads are coming. Reassure the viewers that they won't be missing any crucial gameplay or conversation while ads run, and give them something to do in chat while ads are running. Let's get into how to implement all this with Streamerbot. Previously, the only events that Streamerbot had access to for ad management fired either five seconds before ads ran or right at the moment that ads ran. Because of this, I came up with this roundabout way to make a two-minute warning by using a 28-minute delay on top of my 30-minute ad segments. This worked fine, but it was kind of hard to set up and even harder to explain, and it also resulted in an action that just hung out in the action queue all the time. It could also get a little wacky if your stream has hiccups and you have to stop and start the stream. It was a creative solution that was necessary at the time, but it wasn't ideal. Now as of Streamerbot 0.2.3, there's an upcoming ad trigger that we can use, and the whole process gets significantly simpler. I'll put an import code in the description if you don't want to build it from scratch. The basic setup that I recommend here does four things. First, it gives us a two-minute warning that ads are running. Just before ads run, we play a sound that indicates ads are about to run. While helpful for the viewers, this sound is primarily there to alert the Streamer that ads are happening, so they can pause the action of the gameplay or move on to another conversation topic while ads run. When ads actually run, we send a message to chat about it. This is also where we would add anything else we might want to do at the time. Scene change, some kind of chat-based game, or whatever. Finally, we can send another message when ads are done. We can do this by detecting how long the ad break is going to be from the event data that comes from Twitch and set a delay for that duration. So we can send one final chat message to welcome everyone back from ads or do anything else we might need to clean up whatever we turned on when ads started. This sounds like a lot, but honestly, it's really just much more complicated to explain than it really is once you see how it works. First, let's start with the ad warning action. Right-click in the Actions panel and choose Add. Name the action something like Ad Warring. I like to put all of these actions into a group and queue specifically for ad management just for organizational purposes, but this isn't strictly necessary. In the Triggers box at the top, choose Twitch, Ads, Upcoming Add. In the box that appears, you'll see checkboxes for 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. If you leave all of them checked, this trigger will fire five times, once at 5 minutes before ads run, once at 4 minutes before, and so on. I recommend unchecking all but the two so you get a two-minute warning for ads, and that's it. But feel free to play around with it. The rest of the action will be dynamic, so whatever you choose here will still work. Press OK when you're done. Now we add a chat message warning chat that ads are coming. Right-click, choose Twitch, Chat, Send Message to Channel, and then type your message. I recommend using the variable Minutes if you want to say something like ads will be coming in two minutes. That way, if you want to change the timing of your warning, you can just change the filter on the trigger and this message will still work. Next, we'll create the action that makes a sound just before ads run. Right-click in the action panel, choose Add, and name the action something like Add Soon. Put this action in the same group and queue as the other one, or not, and press OK. In the Triggers panel, choose Twitch, Ads, Add Midroll. This trigger fires about five seconds before ads actually run, and subactions will just play a sound. Right-click, choose Core, Sounds, Play Sound. In the box that appears, navigate to the proper sound file, uncheck the box labeled Finish Playing Before Continue, and then click OK. Next, create two actions called Ads Begin and Ads Finish. Put them both in the group and queue, or not, open up the Ads Begin action. In Triggers, right-click, choose Twitch, Ads, Add Run. This fires when ads actually start running. I like to add a stream marker here, so in the Stream Highlighter, I can see exactly when ads ran. You can do this by right-clicking, choosing Twitch, Channel, Create Stream Marker, and in the box that pops up, put the text you want the marker to have as its description. I use Ads Running. Next, we want to do whatever we want to do when ads actually run. I send a message about how long the ads will be, and let Chat know that I'll be pausing anything important in gameplay. Right-click in subactions and choose Twitch, Chat, send message to Channel. Type whatever it is you want to say here. You can use the Add Length variable to say how many seconds ads will run for. There's also an Add Length Milliseconds variable that has this same value converted into Milliseconds. Thanks, Nate. Let's use this millisecond-based variable to set a delay so we can welcome Chat back after the ads run. Right-click in subactions and do Core, Delay. In this box, put Add Length, Milliseconds, and press OK. Once this delay is finished, we want to welcome Chat back, so we'll just run our Ads Finish action. All you're doing is sending a Chat message. You can simply add that here instead of having a separate action, but I like to keep things separate, so if I want to change what happens when ads are done, I can just go to the Ads Finish action and make my changes there. To call this extra action from the current action, we right-click, choose Core, Actions, Run Action, and then choose the Ads Finish action we made earlier. Now go open up that action. Inside of this action, we put our Chat message to welcome our viewers back and whatever else we need to do. Right-click, subactions, and choose Twitch, Chat. Send message to Channel. Type whatever you wish as a welcome back message. Something like ads should be done now. Welcome back. This is also where you would put any actions that would clean up things. If you did a scene change when ads started running or fired off some sort of minigame or clip viewer or whatever, you want to turn all that stuff off in this action. And that's pretty much it. With this setup, you and Chat will get a couple of minutes heads up before Ads Run, as well as notifications when ads actually do run, both in Chat and in Audio, and a Chat notification when ads are finished. You can turn individual parts of this on and off as desired and change all the timings however you want, and it should all work. But feel free to reach out if you need help setting it up the way you need. For now, check out this video about how to make the dad joke man stream about it.