Utilizing a site-wide twitch embed for ad revenue instead of youtube

[AhFreshMeat]

The more seasoned publishers like @Ryuzaki & @bernard, and @MrMedia reading this may or may not find this interesting, but I thought i’d give it a go.

In a discord, I saw a thought provoking discussion about embedding a twitch video player site-wide for ad revenue… the publishers discussed how they put a 1pixel video player embedded for ad revenue (though i would just put the full sized player, no need to be sneaky?)

Streaming video games & having the recordings replay would obviously be less work (and more fun) than making a youtube video for the posts…though im sure theres advantages to youtube as well.

If you respond, feel free to poke holes or storm up pipe dream advantages in general, or to any of these questions:

• Is adding a twitch embed to every post detrimental to site wide rankings or the site as a whole in some way?
• Is this generally a ‘dumb’ thought to entertain and why?
• Has anyone tried this and seen or heard success?
• Any subjective objections or benefits to this route of monetization?

Curious of the builder’s thoughts on this one.

 

[MrMedia]

Adthrive places a video site wide. All you need is one video, no need to reinvent the wheel.

Never explored Twitch so cannot comment on that.

 

[CCarter]

the publishers discussed how they put a 1pixel video player embedded for ad revenue

At some point there will be a quality check and the platform will notice people are cheating using the 1 pixel version (they'll fix that problem) and then the sites that employed this fraud will get banned from the platform. Then the publisher and his followers will lose a ton of revenue and complain "they did nothing wrong".

If people do the 1 pixel route know that sometime in the future, could be years from now, the hammer will eventually drop.

You're right there is no reason to be sneaky about this.

 

[bernard]

This reminds me of 1 pixel iframes cookie stuffing back in the day.

 

[Potatoe]

Fextralife is a good example of people who are "gaming" the Twitch embed thing hard so you might want to dig into them a bit more, their viewership is insane, hitting upwards of 80k concurrents, because they embed their Twitch channel on the sidebar of their site.

I think this would be a waste unless your website is gaming/internet culture/at least somewhat related to stuff that people care about on Twitch and if you also care about Twitch as a platform and growing a presence there and being a streamer. You'll have a small leg up in that sense, by embedding on your site, but it'll be much less of a leg-up than having 'fans' on any other existing platform that you can funnel to your Twitch.

You also need to be a Twitch Affiliate to earn anything, which doesn't take much (streaming 500 minutes in a month, getting 50 followers, averaging at least 3 viewers.) I'm not sure if they manually approve affiliates or if the manual application process is just for just partners, but if so they'll be looking at the type of content you're streaming... If any significant portion is replays or embeds, that'll make it tougher for you. I've seen people with hundreds of average viewers get rejected from partnership (usually takes average of 75) because too many of them were embedded.

But discoverability is infinitely better on YouTube than Twitch, so if you're trying to grow something, you'll benefit from the embedded views on a YouTube channel a lot more than on a Twitch embed.