Topline
Thousands of content creators on the popular streaming platform Twitch have lost huge numbers of views and watch hours in the weeks after the platform rolled out new code meant to crack down on "viewbots,” or fake accounts created to artificially inflate the number of people watching or engaging with a stream.
Twitch in late July warned streamers they could see changes to view count in the weeks to follow as it rolled out changes that would improve the platform’s ability to “identify viewbots, inauthentic viewership and other potentially fake engagement”—and the numbers show it worked, at least for a little while.
Industry analyst Zach Bussey recently reported that many of Twitch's top 5,000 streamers have seen their lowest-performing streams of the year since the changes, and that sitewide viewership has dropped as much as 22%.
Félix Lengyel, one of Twitch’s most popular streamers better known as xQc, found that streamers who are part of content creation groups seem to have lost the most viewers in the crackdown, and blamed advertising and other incentives as reasons to artificially inflate engagement numbers by paying for viewbots.
Nazar Babenko of Steam Charts, which collects data on broadcasting platforms, reported this week that more than 41,000 Twitch channels with 50 or more average viewers had at least one suspicious stream in the second quarter, and more than 10% showed “clear, persistent signs of viewbotting.”
He said the prevalence of artificial viewers has cost advertisers "millions" and caused many to pull away from platforms like Twitch and Kick in a move that hurts small and mid-sized creators the most.
Bussey on Monday noted that some of the streamers who seemed to take a viewership hit had seen numbers rebound early this week, but a Twitch spokesperson said it has not rolled back any of its changes and that “viewbotter services work hard to evade detection and figure out new detection systems.”
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"Viewbotting doesn’t just hurt sponsors; it undermines trust across the entire ecosystem, making it harder for genuine streamers to get noticed and for the industry to grow sustainably," Babenko said.
Viewbotting is the practice of artificially inflating a live view count by using outside tools to make a channel appear to have more viewers than it actually does. Similarly, followbotting is when a channel is followed by fake accounts, usually controlled by a code meant to make the accounts look as "real" as possible. The practice is a problem across social media platforms and is credited with decreasing the visibility of organic content creators, giving a false impression of an account's popularity, giving an unfair commercial advantage and, on most platforms, violating terms of service. A 2018 study published by The Information suggested that Instagram could have as many as 95 million bot accounts, representing roughly 9.5% of its user base at the time. TikTok is estimated to have removed nearly 256 million scam or bot accounts in 2022 alone. In April of 2021, Twitch said it had identified and was purging over 7.5 million bot accounts used for inflating follow and view counts.
Twitch is a live-streaming website that allows creators—most of whom play video games on the platform—to interact with viewers in real time. The website was purchased by Amazon in 2014 for $970 million and, as of Aug. 1, was the 30th most-visitied website in the world, with about a quarter of its traffic coming from the United States. As of December, the most-followed creators on the platform each had at least 9 million followers, and four of the top five were famous, at least in part, for live streaming themselves playing video games like "Fortnite," "World of Warcraft" and "Call of Duty." Twitch streamers can earn thousands of dollars per month between paid subscriptions, ad revenue, donations from viewers and sponsorships, with a huge variation in profitability depending on the popularity of a channel. Twitch offers tiered subscriptions ranging in price from $5.99 to $24.99 per month, and streamers take home half of their subscription revenue (the website keeps the rest), meaning a channel with 10,000 of the lowest-cost subscribers could make $25,000 per month. Twitch reported $1.8 billion in revenue last year, with more than $650 million estimated to have come from advertising revenue, down more than 8% from 2023. A handful of major advertisers, including AT&T, JP Morgan Chase and Dunkin' recently jumped ship from Twitch after a group of livestreamers alleged the company was promoting antisemitic content. Twitch CEO Dan Clancy later confirmed that some advertisers were reducing ad spend on streams flagged for political or "sensitive social topics.”