Ah, the dreaded purple page of death that appears right in the middle of your favourite streamer. It doesn’t pause anything and it means you could miss something big while it’s on.
Here in this short guide we explain what exactly the Twitch third party tools popup is, why it appears, how often it appears and how to get rid of there and then and permanently.
Let’s dive in.
What is the Twitch “Third party tools” popup?
This.
Whenever someone talks about the Twitch third party tools popup, they are referring to the above or below popup warning.
In these messages, Twitch do not go into specifics but always refer to a third party and use the word “tool” as opposed to “extensions”. The term third party refers to something else besides Twitch.tv and the user (first and second parties) which is interacting with a stream or video on demand. However, not all third party extensions will trigger this and there’s a lot of confusion (and broken code) about what triggers this and how to fix it.
Twitch.tv allows third party extensions
for the streamer and in fact encourages their use. Third party TOOLS for viewers, however, is where the problems begin.
What third party tools trigger the popup?
There are two types of third party tools that can trigger this popup for a viewer – ad blockers and embeds. Let’s take a look at them both.
Ad blockers
The most common cause of this dreaded popup are adblockers installed on your browser – but it gets tricky. Twitch themselves do NOT prohibit users from using ad blockers. It is clear in their Ad Experience page.
We do not have a policy that prohibits the use of ad blockers and understand that many folks do not want ads in their viewer experience. However, ads support Creators and are necessary to keep Twitch a free service and continue innovating and investing in our communities worldwide.
Twitch Ad Experience
So, if you see the popup and you have an adblocker, it is not because you are using an ad blocker but that the adblocker you’ve chosen is interfering with the stream itself. By this, we mean the adblocker is changing the functionality of the page and not just blocking the ad. This is likely an out of date ad blocker, a poorly made ad blocker or an ad blocker which could be malicious that is behind the current Twitch software.
Generally, ad blockers operate by changing the intended functionality of web pages. This can lead to performance problems like reduced resolution, inoperability of the video player, and other viewing issues. For the best, most consistent Twitch experience, we recommend watching without an ad blocker.
Twitch Ad Experience
If you’re running an ad blocker and getting the pop ups then try these steps:
- Checking to make sure your ad blocker is up to date
- Try a different ad blocker
- Remove the ad blocker and support the stream
Embeds
Many content creators who embed their streams or VODs have had this popup appear on their site, and then most users on their website will also see it. The most likely cause of the popup coming up on these website is more likely to be the server which has the embed code placed on rather than advert blockers (although they won’t help).
The most likely explanation at the core of it is bad code on Twitch’s side, the likelihood is that Twitch is trying to serve an ad to the viewer but it isn’t able to for whatever reason and it’s default reasoning is that if the ad can’t be served then there must be a third party tool involved.
Those kind of embeds (when you click share on a video on Twitch) play the video through Twitch’s server, so shouldn’t often cause a problem. The problem comes from embeds from third party tools…
Twitch wants you to watch streams on their website and nowhere else, otherwise it can’t give you the best performance (as per their terms of service and ad experience manifesto) possible, using third party tools such as MultiTwitch is a lottery for this reason.
Twitch is getting tougher and tougher on monetisation and although they appear to have a soft approach on their help pages, the reality feels different.
If this keeps happening to you, there is only a handful of solutions:
- Watch the stream directly on Twitch.tv
- Update your browser
- Disable ad blockers
How to get rid of the Twitch third party popup
The following solutions may help you get rid of the popup.
- Update your ad blockers
- Remove your ad blockers
- Try a different ad blockers
- Stream in incognito/private mode
- Stream directly on Twitch.tv
- Sign up for Twitch prime
Unfortunately most of the above solutions are not desirable and will leave you having to watch ads or just not watch the stream at all.
Twitch.tv started off for many years in hyper growth mode where their interests were to attract as many content creators as possible and to support their growth. Now that Twitch is at a considerable size you can start to see a lot of decisions which move towards monetisation – which is not a surprise since they are a business and that is their goal.
