If you have been around Twitch for any decent amount of time, you will have noticed at least one person with a nice battery looking icon next to their name in a Twitch chatroom.  In case you did not know, this is the sign of a Twitch Turbo user.  Turbo is a way of upgrading your Twitch account for $8.99/month.  This will bring you several unique benefits, like more variety in the color of your name, unique emotes to use in chat, and the ability to turn your standard robot emotes into monkey themed emotes or cartoony text bubble themed emotes.

The main benefit (in my eyes), however, is that Turbo users do not see advertisements on Twitch.  While this benefits you, it does not harm the streamer either, as Twitch still gives the ad revenue for your “view” of the ad to the streamer.  The money you pay helps support Twitch, which is always good for streamers and viewers alike.  In my opinion, while Turbo is a great upgrade to Twitch, it is only worth it if you spend a lot of time in a partnered stream, where lots of ads are played, or if you spend a lot of time moving between streams, where ads are played automatically when the stream loads up.  Keeping in mind that Turbo does not give a direct benefit to streamers, $8.99 is a big investment for a lot of people who are on Twitch purely as a viewer.

Update 10/16 – Twitch Turbo has since been replaced by Twitch Prime.