No more pre-rolls? Twitch is experimenting with some changes to its ad experience

There’s nothing more annoying on Twitch than being hit by advertisements one after another while you’re trying to channel surf.

The platform’s growing emphasis on advertisements has increasingly impeded the viewing experience, but during a panel at TwitchCon today, execs gave us hope for a better future.

Don’t worry, you’ll still be hit with advertisements, but if Twitch’s current experiments work as intended, maybe they won’t be quite so cumbersome. Among other things, the platform is working to create a browsing experience that lets viewers hop from stream to stream without getting hit by pre-roll ads every time they change channels.

The platform’s chief product officer Tom Verrilli said that a recent experiment giving some viewers this experience could drive growth.

“That work is very explicitly designed to both help new viewers and smaller streamers grow,” Verrilli said. “What we want to do is lower the cost of exploring and sampling and finding new streamers.”

According to the platform’s vice president of monetization Mike Minton, eradicating pre-roll ads in situations where viewers are checking out creators for the first time.

In the long-term, Minton hinted at moving away from pre-roll ad experiences. He also mentioned that making ads skippable could be on the horizon, but don’t expect to see skippable ads on the platform anytime soon. The platform doesn’t have any dates or timeline for skippable ads.

Related: Twitch execs try to justify 50-50 revenue share and we’re not convinced

“We’ve been prioritizing ad breaks over pre-rolls,” Minton said. “Certainly in a pre-roll format you want a skippable ad … but our overall strategy is to reduce pre-rolls so skippable ads kind of fall down the list [of priorities].”

Additionally, Minton noted that the platform is working to provide creators with ways to mitigate the negative impact a scheduled ad can have on the flow of a stream.

“I understand you’re not all in the dashboard as you’re streaming,” he said. “You’re often in other tools so we have good ideas to help you understand an ad break is running.”

On the viewer side of things, Minton mentioned that in the “near term” the platform will start to introduce ways that users can effectively “snooze” an ad break if there’s something going on during a stream that people won’t want to miss.

While there wasn’t a timeline given for any ad-related changes on Twitch, the sentiment toward optimizing the user experience is one that some fans have called for after the platform intensified incentives for creators to run more ads.

Among the chorus of those criticizing the platform’s ad experience was Ludwig, who posted a 10-minute video to YouTube claiming Twitch was “killing their website.”