Likewise, If too many people buy Premium, they won't be able to sell as many ad spots. Plus, the people who actually pay for Premium probably make heavy use of YouTube. My guess is that they'll instead start increasing the price of Premium to get more people to give it up.
Back in the day before Amazon brought out Twitch turbo would give ad free viewing plus a few extra perks (different emotes, full RBG setting for colouring your username).
When they launch Twitch Prime (now rebranded as Prime Gaming) as a benefit for Amazon Prime they copied the feature set from Turbo and added a free subscription to a streamer of your choice. So most people swapped from Turbo to Prime.
They stopped pushing Turbo and hit its purchase page but if you looked closely enough you could find it.
But prime wasn’t really a money maker, sure it was a benefit to the viewer but it was an extremely generous offer (helped soften the blow that Amazon just brought everyone’s fav gamer streaming platform)
But yeah it was tanking ad impressions (which they have were trying to expand the ad business during this time) cause you know you know a sub token worth 5 bucks, ad free viewing and all the other benefits of Amazon prime for what 8 bucks a month. You were a fool not to swap from the existing Turbo offering to Prime, and if you didn’t have Amazon Prime but you already sub’ed to atleast one streamer a month it was only a few extra bucks a month compared to what you were already paying.
So they removed the ad free viewing from Prime gaming and started pushing Turbo again for another 9 bucks a month.
But even that can get acquired.
Most also hamper investors, of course.
And then you're seeing it in their earnings call. (Though it's still a small percentage of revenue)
I wonder how long that will last.