Can we try to evaluate streaming ad density?

Hi there fellow nerd-ballers.

For a while now we've seen some complaints from popular streamers and organizations that ad impressions are down significantly. Ususally this is blamed on adblocking. Specifcally Take asking people to "not crush the house" shows how big of an issue it can be. I'm not speculating on his financial standing! However, I've noticed that for the last 12 months the ad density seems to be down even for people without adblockers. I've taken an interest in the ad saturation for Twitch (I have barely tested Azubu as they're really not up to par yet) and tested around a bit. Now remember that this is a tiny sample and that's the reason I post this:

I've tried multiple accounts and connected physically from France, Germany and via VPNs from IPs in Russia, Sweden, the Netherlands, the UK and the USA. I've noticed that Sweden, France and the USA have a high ad saturation with nearly 100% pre rolls playing when starting streams and nearly always full ad runs (up to 3) when ads were triggered by streamers. Germany had about 50% pre roll quota, so did the Netherlands. UK and Russia barely had ads for me. Curiously I see no(!) ads besides 1-2 pre rolls a day from Germany. This leads me to suspect that international ad buy has not been scaling with the rising popularity of Twitch. That would make sense given that now WCS, LCS, Dota2 tournaments etc. can all achieve up to six figure viewer numbers. These streams alone can deliver morde ads in a day than the whole site did a while back but they are 100% English streams which might put off potential ad buys.

Now why is that interesting? Cause Twitch partners would like to know how to help increase their ad impressions and anybody considering a partnership should have a rough idea of how his stream could perfrom financially. I must stress again that this post is NOT about Adblock being bad or anything like that.

Here we must remember how video ads are sold: via impression numbers. This means that 100.000 people seeing 1 ad per person generate 100.000 ad impressions. Additionally there can be an extra payout based on the achieved CTR and similiar methods of measuring effectiveness. Every ad triggered is a potential impression but obviously there can be limits to it such as "show a maximum of x repetitions of this ad to one IP per 24h". As companies don't want to just buy ads and then see how many impressions are generated they will usually buy ads with a fixed budget attached. Once this is reached the ad is not shown anymore. Due to the way markets work (specifically retail makes a significant share of their whole year revenue in the last quarter) ad buy will not be even over the year. Christmas will be packed, January will be empty. So far so normal. What I've observed though is that even now in April ad impressions are still low even without adblock. If you would like to know more google it, online ads are not wrong to know about given their volume in daily life for all of us (without adblock).

To figure out how many ads are sold for each region one could obviously ask Twitch but it would not be in their interest to disclose those numbers. This is why I would like to ask streamers and viewers alike to help find out how to shape expectations for streamers based on their viewership. Streamers can find those numbers via their dashboard (average viewers, average ads shown etc.). Now remember that sharing this is probably against Twitch TOS/partnership contracts. That's why I would especially ask for former streamers or anonymous data from active streamers. Remember that I'm not trying to fuck with Twitch's numbers and I don't want numerical values. All I'd like to know is how the quota between viewers and ads is shaped when you stream. Based on what people post here further analysis would be possible.

If you're a viewer, please take a few seconds and type up from which country you connect to Twitch, how often you see pre-rolls and triggered ads. If you're a streamer, please let us know how your ad quota is. If you can, please let me know whether the ads you see are local (companies from your country, ads in your language) or international (English when in non English speaking countries mostly). I'm trying to get a rough idea of how the ad market is shaped and would be glad to compile it later but first an approximate outline would go a long way in designing a more methodical way of collecting the data.

Disclaimer: I am not associated with Twitch, their competitors or anybody in the online ad industry. I'm simply a business student who has an interest in it. I am not responsible should you disclose information you're not allowed to. I'm also not responsible for nationality flames when you post your country or North Korea targeting you.

Edit: I've been reaching out to some people (partnered streamers) and it seems that while some of them can't seem to deliver ads others can. Most notably there are 100% deliveries for EG streams but at the same time close to no deliveries at some smaller streams. I've reproduced this once for now but it's obviously possible that some partners get better terms than others (service sellers, basically).