Streamers Dr. DisRespect and BikeMan are claiming Twitch is forcing ads in their channels that promote Tyler “Ninja” Blevins’ special New Year’s Eve livestream at Times Square. Both streamers said on Twitter these ads were part of the ad rolls that run in every streamer’s channel without their control.
None of them showed the ad. Their main issue with them seems simply to be that they can’t control it.
Related: Ninja is the first player to get 5,000 Victory Royales in Fortnite—watch the winning moment.
BikeMan called it “a direct conflict of interest” due to being an ad of a competitor’s stream. “I am not a fan of it. This should be a given, and just common sense,” BikeMan said.
Dr DisRespect refrained from mentioning Ninja directly in his commentary, but asked Twitch to “get these ugly looking New Years Eve ad rolls” off his page.
Ninja replied to BikeMan at first, but then deleted his tweet—but it had already been screengrabbed. Ninja says “the event is going to be broadcasted to millions of people and continue to grant exposure to Twitch, which in turn allows other streamers to gain more viewers.” Ninja also implied that BikeMan might not have liked the ad roll because it was him featured in it.
Ninja has received public backlashes recently for other events. He allegedly got a Fortnite player banned in November by claiming he was stream sniping him during a match. The community criticized Ninja for his behavior while analyzing the opponent on stream. A few days later he was also accused of getting a player banned because they had high ping. But this is the first time Ninja has been directly involved in accusations from fellow streamers due to Twitch.
Ninja and Twitch didn’t comment publicly about the claims at the time of writing.
H/T Nicer_Chile
Update Dec. 28 10:25am CT: The aforementioned ads have been removed from rotation, according to Hassan Bokhari, a partnerships account manager at Twitch.
“The feedback has been relayed, but it’s not any one broadcasters fault,” Bokhari said. “Please don’t put blame on him. I don’t know all the pieces, but I do know that the ad itself was removed from rotation.”
Correction Dec. 29 8:27pm CT: A previous version of this story incorrectly said BikeMan streams Fortnite. He doesn’t. We regret this error.
