What is viewbotting? Twitch reports massive drop in viewership after cracking down on viewbots

Twitch has introduced new measures regarding viewbots that have led to a drop in viewership for many accounts. According to E Sport, viewbotting is a practice often employed by streamers across various platforms. By this method, Twitch streamers can add fake viewers via bots to any of their streams, thus rapidly increasing the total viewership count of their streams.

Now, there is currently a crackdown on such practices, leading to a massive viewership drop. For years, streamers on Twitch have used this method, which is against the app's policies, to get more views on their streams.

According to Dexerto, in March, a user who went by the name QueenGloriaRP was banned after she was found to have engaged in viewbotting. She was streaming when she accidentally opened a tab that displayed a viewbotting software in place. Although the Twitch streamer denied the accusations, she was later suspended for violating the app's policies.

More about the latest Twitch crackdown on viewbotting

Twitch has long tried to deal with the problem of viewbotting, but has never succeeded completely. According to Dexerto, the recent stern measures put in place at the end of July have led to an overall 24% fall in viewership across the app. This overall fall in viewership started last week, on August 21, and is continuing even now.

Last month, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy, who appeared in an interview hosted by YouTuber and streamer Noah Kara, discussed how viewbotting was a widespread problem on the platform. He said:

"Yes, that’s a constant battle. There are third parties that do it — especially when you get the ads, they viewbot for ads, they viewbot for all sorts of things. The interesting thing is, the viewbotting isn’t always… There isn’t one big one."

He continued:

"Most of the viewbotting and most of the fraud is not on a big streamer, it’s on the small streamer, but thousands of them. If they can create a thousand bogus accounts, then they create viewbots, then, you know, they can create bogus revenue."

The official Twitter account of Twitch had previously released a statement regarding their measures, stating the new system would help identify bots and reduce the practice of viewbotting. The statement read:

"We recently made changes that meaningfully improved our ability to identify viewbots, inauthentic viewership, and other potentially fake engagement. These changes will roll out over the next few weeks. So, if your channel was viewbotted, or if some of your viewers are artificial or inflated, you will see an impact to your channel’s viewcount. This also means that third party sites that publish unverified Twitch viewcounts are going to see changes to that data over time."

CEO Dan Clancy also assured streamers that only those accounts using bots to increase their views would be affected, saying:

"While I know for some of you it has been frustrating, we wanted to take our time to make sure we were not inadvertently filtering out real users. I wanted to highlight that bots come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes streamers may be actively working with third parties to inflate their numbers."

He added:

"In other cases, the bots may be used to harass streamers. We don’t want either type, because Average Concurrent Viewers (ACCV) is intended to be a measure of the people that are watching the streamer at any given point in time."

But it is not just small accounts that are affected by the measures put in place to combat viewbotters. According to Dexerto, Asmongold, who is ranked as one of the biggest accounts on the platform with 3.6 million followers, also witnessed a 10% to 20% drop in his viewership over the last week since the measures were implemented.

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