Twitch's Viewbotting Epidemic

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]Streaming has never been bigger. In the year 2026, right now, we have IRL streamers taking over, making mainstream news, as well as mainstream artists like DoAP playing Overwatch on Twitch. And you would think, well, this would be a good thing. It means it's more mainstream, more people that watch streams, more content to be available.

[00:00:19]And honestly, I think it might be the worst timeline we could be in. Why do I say that? Well, as a content creator for the last year, I would say and last few years within the last year specifically, the topic of viewbotting has been really hot and quite frankly, it's a really, really dark ecosystem that goes on where you can view bbot your way to the top of the charts. And there's ways you could do that where your live stream just has a higher number of viewers, more followers, more chatters that are just bot chatters chatting along. Or you could go the other route which isn't really view botting but like it's a way to take over algorithms which is through clipping. I actually ended up trying some clipping stuff recently with my streams and I ended up not doing it anymore but I'll share my experience on that in a sec. But the reason why I even wanted to talk about any of this is because Twitch recently put out a statement as of a couple hours ago. So from directly from Twitch I noted our work combating viewbonding from CEO Dan Clansancy. There's been a lot of discussion recently about viewbonding on Twitch and I wanted to share an update on our enforcement efforts. Viewbotting is bad for business. We don't benefit from it and we believe it harms creator ecosystems overall. However, effectively combating viewbotting is a challenge. As we develop updates to our real-time detection algorithms, viewing companies quickly respond with updates to avoid detection. Also, our detection systems must be precise to ensure that legitimate viewers are appropriately counted. And I read this first sentence of view botting is bad for business. We don't benefit from it. And I just kind of like kind of can't help but laugh. Uh for those who don't remember last year Twitch tried to step in and you know take a stance versus view botting and it basically crushed everyone's numbers who was probably legitimately streaming especially if you were someone that had uh any drops viewership. Drops is a totally different thing. I I'll talk about that too. I I have a I think I have a little bit of insight into that over my years of Overwatch and with rivals. But basically what ended up happening is a lot of like lurkers weren't getting detected and people's viewerships kind of cratered and now they they walked it back mostly right away and then you noticed that the people who maybe were thought of to be viewing and the people that I've definitely seen like if you look into some streaming categories especially ones that if you know a game is doing a lot of sponsors you'll see like some people that are around like the 3 to 4,000 viewership range and I've seen before and I'm like I've this this guy literally doesn't have a single person chatting. How the is how the hell is he 4,000 viewers? And it's not like, you know, slow chat. There's a difference. I typically have a slow chat because I have an older audience. I'm talking zero. And they get sponsors like quite frequently. And I know how much those sponsorships can pay and they're potentially thousands of dollars. Hell, if you get the insane ones, they could be tens of thousands of dollars. And they're not real. And as a creator, you sit there and you look at all these people that are basically cheating and you go, "Well, Twitch is a kingmaker platform where if you're not in, say, the top row or hell, even the top three slots, you're effectively not growing.

[00:03:12]You are forced to be using YouTube, Tik Tok, Instagram, whatever else platforms to drive people over to it." and they say that it doesn't hurt them or it hurts their business, but realistically I don't think it does because then they can go to an advertiser and say, "Hey, we have two billion views this month."

[00:03:30]Like that's a lot of eyeballs on your potential product. As opposed to if they created view botting now all of a sudden it's 800 million. That's worth a whole lot less money. Granted, you then could say obviously with advertisements like what's the return on investment, right?

[00:03:43]Like if they're putting money in it at 2 billion and there's not actually 2 billion, it's actually closer to like 500 million people or whatever they was actually watching, like they're going to be able to tell a difference. But are they? Because how do you even get feedback on that? Unless it's a clickable link or they're buying tickets specifically through an advertisement on Twitch. Tracking a lot of that metrics is hard outside of just eyeballs or views. And views is something that is king in the creator space. And that's why people also hire clippers because they want your content to be viewed everywhere. Like I said, if you're not at the top of the Twitch category, you need people coming in from outside of it. And one of the best things you can quote unquote do is hire clippers or clipping services that will come in, clip all of your content, put it everywhere, and then I mean it's possible, I'm not saying that a lot of them do, but some probably do where they might even bought their clips higher up, right? Because the way it works is that like streamer or content creator says like, "Hey, I'll give you $5,000. Here's your budget for the month." And then that clipper takes like a percentage and then they have like a pot, right, where it's like, "Oh, you know, everybody that's in this clipping discord, you know, you you get to distribute $4,000 between you and like whoever gets like the most views, like you get percentages of it." Wouldn't they kind of be incentivized to get even more views on those videos, which means that they might even view bought their own clips to get the clips even higher, to get the clips even higher, then it's in front of more people. And it's kind of a really weird cycle and you know, scary stuff. Honestly, there's a lot more to be said there, but I want to keep reading because this gets kind of important. Twitch goes on to say, "Today, we're introducing an enforcement type that we plan to roll out over the next few weeks for channels identified as persistently view botting. We will apply a cap to the streamer's CCV for a fixed period of time and in all of Twitch's services. The cap will be based upon historical data regarding the creator's nonviewed viewbotted traffic.

[00:05:37]Repeated violations will result in longer penalties. Streamers will be notified when an enforcement is applied along with the duration of the penalty and can appeal through the appeals portal. So maybe it's just me, but it seems like they're going to be going off previous data, which says to me right away, if you're someone who's already been doing it, congrats, you now slipped through. You're fine. Now, does it deter people in the future? I would say there's a potential possibility that it does that. However, I think of things like drops, for example. Lots of games do drop incentives. I used to stream a lot of Overwatch, and I still play a lot of Overwatch, but lots less than I used to. and drops was a big part of the creator economy. In my opinion, it's what props up the entire Overwatch creator economy in general. And so what you get is like, you know, you watch for eight hours, you get a skin on, I don't know, Bastion, or you watch 6 hours and you get a loot box, right? And those are real people that are watching, but they're not always watching. They just leave their PC on and leave. But that's still a real person. And you can't tell the difference between someone who's sitting at their PC and not sitting at their PC watching something unless they're chatting. But not everyone actively chats. I argue, especially with older audiences, most people aren't chatting. It's why YouTube has actually become a great streaming platform. For myself, especially where a lot of people actually just put it on their TV and they don't ever say a word, but like they're watching and it's grown my channels significantly. I can speak from experience. But the problem though is you do get a big bump in viewership. So, what happens if you know you average say 2 3,000 viewers and all of a sudden drops come out for your game and you're a streamer that only streams that game and now you go to 10,000, right? Is Twitch going to punish you? Are they going to push you down really hard? I don't know. They might. I think the easier thing here would be that most viewers are not really that smart.

[00:07:18]They're pretty obvious. Uh, and for a lot of streamers, it takes a few hours to get to your maximum peak. Like I'm just going to show you this in my my view right now. This tweet from Summit that came out earlier today. Streamer viewership peaks around 3 hours of streamers hitting their highest views in the first 30 minutes. They are just built different, I guess. Smile. And then like I saw like Shroud retweeted this and as you see like a lot of people are are responding to it as well. And it it's pretty true. Like it's not always 3 hours. Sometimes it's a little less.

[00:07:42]Sometimes it's a little more depending on what games they're playing, if they're going to variety, if they change games. That's the other thing is I've never Okay, I know it's a little different with the new new age streamers, right? There's a lot of newer new age streamers that just kind of stream whatever, especially like IRL.

[00:07:57]But as a gaming streamer for years, if you streamed one game, right? Let's say you streamed it for 3 hours and then you swap to another game. Historically, your viewership will go down. Even if it rebounds and goes back up. Let's say, you know, you were playing Overwatch and then you wanted to go play League of Legends and let's say League of Legends is having some insane event right now and everyone wanted to watch people watch it, whatever reason, it will go down because all the Overwatch people will leave and then League of Legends people would then appear. But a lot of times there's viewership doesn't move.

[00:08:29]If anything, it just goes up and that's just a little odd. I'd say this also reminds me of the article that came out about a month and a half ago from the CEO of Night Media where if you don't remember what he said, I'll show it to you. The CEO was talking about viewbotting and basically they said that if everyone else is doing it, you should too. I would never explicitly say that you should view bot views on Twitch other than in the title of this article, but the reality is if you're not viewing and everyone else is, you're at a disadvantage. When you're competing in a category where you are buried and you don't have 500 plus viewers, maybe shifting your strategy to paying clippers and buying bots helps a streamer break through. I wanted to see what it would cost to bought a stream.

[00:09:06]And for $180 a week on ViewBOT, I can get 1,500 followers, 225 quote unquote chatters, and 750 current viewers. Not bad for less than $800 a month. Now, the article in general, I'm not going to go too much further into it because a lot of it actually basically said that unless you're you're cheating, you're not trying, which I don't totally agree with. I think there's a lot of creators that make really, really, really, really, really good content. And honestly, the hardest part about making really, really, really, really, really good content is doing it consistently and having it come out quite often. For I've been playing a lot of Pokémon recently. I think of like Wolfie is a good example. If you know anything about Pokemon, uh, World Champ, he has really well-edited, polished videos, but you can only really do those once a week at maximum. And streaming on top of that is really hard to do. So, if you do content beyond that, it it's really hard to do top tier content consistently and also do other things. That said though, it's definitely possible. And so, like the narrative of like if you're not cheating, you're not trying, you have to view bot is kind of a little bit disingenuous. If you make good content, you will come through, but it's also a lot of luck as well. Let's not pretend.

[00:10:09]I just want to finish off this tweet.

[00:10:10]While streamers will be notified, we will not make a follow-up announcement on when we begin these enforcements, and we will not publicly share details when and where these enforcements are implied. Unfortunately, providing details simply makes it easier for companies to work around our interventions. We believe this approach will help us make meaningful progress against viewing. We will continue to refining our systems and expand when we apply these enforcements over time. Dan Clancy. Now, do I think that these changes are going to do anything? Not really. I would actually be very surprised if they do. I think that probably more people are going to get cro caught in the crossfires for accidentally having higher viewership with like drops or something like that.

[00:10:48]Or you could even maliciously do that to someone where you could have someone else maliciously viewbot your stream quote unquote like someone else's and then after doing it for like a week or two, well then they're going to get slapped down by Twitch for viewbotting even if they're not the ones doing it.

[00:11:03]It could be used as an harassment tool because it will then punish them. and actually doesn't reward them, right? So, like historically, if somebody view bots your channel, even if you don't want it, I've had it happen to me, like I was playing rivals one time. Someone view bbotted my YouTube stream to over 100,000 views and I had a suspicion it was coming cuz someone was like chatting like, "We should have more viewers in here. Like, we should get this over to 100,000." I was like, "Uh-oh, here it comes." And then it shot up and then it just dries off after. But, uh, like you could you could actually do damage to someone's career that way. And that does make me a little sad because realistically when I started streaming six years ago, getting closer to six and a half years now, it was something I started doing out of necessity. I loved watching Twitch. I was only a PC gamer for about a year and a half at that point. Uh coming from console, Twitch culture really wasn't a thing. And I'd really come to enjoy watching streams and I did it at the start of co and I was able to make a living, get out of debt and build an amazing community and meet some of my greatest friends that I've could have ever met. Many that I still hang out with and talk to every day to this day through streaming. And today I look at the the space and I can see that no people don't really want to talk to each other as much. People don't hang out. They don't raid each other. If you do raid somebody a lot of times their just their chat just instantly leaves. that does no one really says anything. Collaborations are still pretty common, but less so. A lot of people like to abuse the stream together feature. If you've never seen the the nice uh small streamer special where like seven people get together and they just leave their stream on 24/7 uh and then they're not even playing games together. They're like in all different categories. They all have like 20 viewers, 15 viewers, 10 viewers, right?

[00:12:38]And then maybe there'll be one guy who's actually live with like 60 viewers and they all combine together their chats and their stream so that one person has 200. So it's combined 250 viewers and so they're higher in the category and basically boosting them all up and people do it sometimes with like offline accounts as well and you know that whole system just kind of is I understand the idea of streaming together was like a cool idea in theory, but most people just abuse it to try to force their way to the top of the category. And so like I really have never thought about the idea of like, you know, like, oh god, we got a we got a viewbot here. Like I am to not sound arrogant. Maybe I do sound arrogant. I feel like I'm pretty successful with streaming, especially YouTube. I I've run four YouTube channels pretty consistently and we get good viewership on almost everything we do. My variety used to not be as good, but it's gotten better over time. And I do maybe a little bit less rivals than Overwatch these days, but there's only so much a man can do. And so like I've never really thought about it, but like sometimes when you when you open up these Twitch streams and you see like 20, 30, 40,000 viewers and you think to yourself like, man, like how did how are they getting there, right? And you go and check and they're there within their first like 15 minutes of streaming and it's like, huh, that's odd. It's kind of strange. That said though, I really do hope that they crack down on it. But more importantly, actually, I hope that this doesn't scare away potential advertisers because this could be detrimental to YouTube. It could be detrimental to Twitch. It could be detrimental to you to Tik Tok. Uh if they're having botting problems as well, which I'm not sure if they are. But regardless though, uh the fight against view bots is almost like the fight against cheaters in video games. It's always an uphill struggle. You never really can totally win. You can only just do the best you can. And I guess we all got to do the best we