Block Twitch Ads with AdBlock
What is Twitch?
We will assume that if you’re looking for a Twitch ad blocker, you already know what Twitch is. But for many internet users who may discover Twitch in the coming months or years, we’ll lay out the basics of Twitch, and how AdBlock can help improve your experience when you’re visiting it.
Twitch is one of the most-visited websites on the internet. In the United States alone, Twitch attracts nearly 200 million visits a month, but if you’re over the age of 30 there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of it.
So what is it? Twitch is a website primarily dedicated to gaming that shows live streams of people playing video games, and millions of others people chatting with one another about the games being played. From FIFA to Fortnite, people can broadcast themselves playing games (and doing many other things) while interacting with their audience via built-in chat tools.
It’s so popular, and growing so quickly, that Twitch was acquired by Amazon for close to $1 billion almost five years ago, in September of 2014.
How does Twitch make money?
There are two primary ways that Twitch makes money: subscriptions and advertising. Users can subscribe to channels they like for $4.99 a month and that monthly fee is split between the streamer and Twitch, with Twitch keeping anywhere from 30-50% of the monthly fee.
The other primary monetization vehicle is advertisements. Much like YouTube, Twitch runs ads before, during, after and alongside the video streams visitors view on its site. So users will see pre-roll video ads (the 15 second video ads that run prior to a stream) as well as ads during the videos they are watching. They will also see other ads, which appear in different shapes and sizes on Twitch, depending on the type of feed a user is watching.
Twitch maintains a detailed overview of its ad formats here.
Does every Twitch stream include ads?
Whether or not you see ads on Twitch depends on a few things: if you’ve subscribed to Amazon Prime or you’ve subscribed to a specific channel, you are less likely to see ads. Some of the ads that run are determined by the streamer -- that is, the person broadcasting a popular Fortnite video, if they have enough subscribers, can decide whether or not they want to show ads to the people viewing their stream.
For Twitch visitors that are not Amazon Prime subscribers or paying $4.99 to the channel they are viewing, they are likely to see ads, and potentially a lot of them.
Can AdBlock block Twitch ads?
Blocking ads on Twitch has become one of the features we hear most about from our users. We’ve written a detailed help desk article on the topic, which is one of our most viewed pieces of support content.
We do our best to block ads on Twitch, and AdBlock should be able to block most ads on Twitch, but some will slip through. In-stream video ads are particularly difficult to block because the ads and the content (the videos users are watching) are served from the same place, which means it’s hard to distinguish between advertising content and the videos themselves. That means that the answer to the question, "does AdBlock work on Twitch?" is more complicated.
Like YouTube, Twitch likely has hundreds of engineers working to make it a success. That means that Twitch is constantly making tweaks and updates to Twitch that may break AdBlock’s ability to block ads temporarily. Be assured that we are working hard to block them, and if you have any specific complaints you can always reach out to let us know where to focus our efforts in blocking Twitch ads.
