- Twitch’s new anti-bot system caused viewer counts to nosedive across hundreds of channels, with some losing over half their displayed audience.
- Channels running 24/7 reruns saw the biggest drops, with Mira falling from 2,000+ to under 200 viewers overnight.
- The cleanup affects sponsorship deals and ad rates since brands have been paying premium prices for audiences that were partially fake.
Fair play to Twitch for biting the bullet and doing it - I remember Twitter, Reddit and many more committing to tackle bots, but I suspect that when top management see the data and impact to their sweet sweet equity of half their platform numbers vanishing overnight they suddenly have different priorities
Bots aren’t really good for Twitch as a network. They don’t provide meaningfully engagement or interaction, they throw off the algorithm designed to search for trending streams, and they consume system resources to broadcast data to clients that aren’t using it.
But neither is the process of hunting and squashing bots necessarily productive. You’ll get some number of false positives and load on your tech support staff. You piss off your talent base (because you’re effectively demanding they take a pay cut arbitrarily). And the bot farms come back over time, through re-engineering or simple blind persistence.
impact to their sweet sweet equity of half their platform numbers vanishing overnigh
It’s always been a game of liar’s poker with advertisers. We pretend to show their ads. They pretend to pay us.
Presumably, Twitch wouldn’t have done this purge if they didn’t see an ROI in it - either from advertisers demanding a more authentic count for renewals or because the spread on these extra bot users wasn’t enough to justify the server load.
Bots aren’t really good for Twitch as a network.
But investors don’t look at “quality of network” they look at number of users.
What investors they are owned by amazon and with the discounted rate I’m sure twitch gets its literally sucking money from them. Ad nets don’t want to pay for fake views so this is in twitches long term interest to do this.
Turns out Amazon is publicly traded.
Whose buying amazon stock to get a bit of twitch???
*Who’s
Literally anyone buying AMZN, effectively
Yeah, but you need decent “quality of network” to grow the number of actually-existing users. New users are gonna see the softcore streams and think they signed up to the wrong kind of streaming webpage.
They have to if they want to make profitable investment.
I know “turning a profit” hasn’t been fashionable of late (which is why these phoney baloney bot populations have been tolerated for so long). But we’re running out of free money to throw around for anyone outside the MAG7.
Could be that purging the fake accounts is something their investors are demanding. Idk
Remember when Elon bought Twitter in large part to get rid of the bots?
No, I remember when he tried to back out of buying it but the SEC forced him to follow through.
If only they hadn’t…
Honestly, Twitter not being a cesspool when Musk bought it is a huge retcon. Remember, Twitter is where Trump rose to power. Jack Dorsey is just a tech bro billionaire among the rest of them.
Elon had no reason to buy twitter, he just enjoys price manipulation and gambling. However, once he did obtain the platform, his priority was very clearly to manipulate the public with it, that’s why he fired all but the most loyal of staff.
In his defense, what else could he have done with it? Run it like a normal business? He’s incapable of that, best he can do is state-subsidized overpromising stuff, and there was no angle for that with Twitter.
He actually could have just let it operate like normal, give himself bonuses, and slowly sell off his shares like he did with Tesla. Small changes like blue checkmark verification fees, ad free premiums, and labor cost minimization can be stretched out over time.
Instead he immediately cut the place in half and started promoting propaganda and hate. It’s well proven his algorithm sent democrats and liberal ideology to the back while heavily promoting Republicans.
He actually could have just let it operate like normal
We both could have done that. But I’m not sure he could have.
When a metric becomes a target, it loses it’s value. If viewers or views are what drive monetization, then that will be all that matters.
Looks like dead internet theory was closer to the truth that one might have thought.
Looks like a lot of right wingers were botting their numbers. Asmongold lost a ton of “viewers”.
It was an open secret.
More views equals better visibility on twitch which equals more real subscribers.
Seeing other “people” donate makes real people donate more.
If the antibot sweeps keep going and numbers keep plummetting, it’s gonna be lots of fun for the sponsors in the next contract revision with the streamers.
I mean…if I wanted to watch porn I’m going to watch porn, not streams of simps paying for a glimpse of nipple.
Wish they did it 10 years ago and maintained themselves as being a space for playing video games. So many esports communities destroyed by losing relevance versus the IRL streams that have nothing to do with gaming.
How do other streams destroy existing communities?
I wouldn’t say destroyed, but it definitely watered down the brand. Twitch was funded as a game streaming website as opposed to the site it branched off of, which was Justin.tv - a site that was for live-streaming yourself, so theoretically perfect for just chatting, hot tubs and beaches etc. Sure, that site doesn’t exist anymore, but I think it would have been better to create a new site for this kind of content, possibly even share the accounts etc with twitch if the user wants (or even use different profiles per site that ultimately link to the same user). Sure, Twitch doesn’t really care because there’s no real competition, the business is super hard and probably still deficit even for a giant like Amazon.
Like, it feels at times you went on twitch and the first thing you saw were barely clothed women and gambling. I don’t have a moral problem with either, but it raises questions about a site’s identity and their target audience.
Dang, mad respect for them for taking on bots. Most companies love anything that inflate their membership numbers. Imagine how few users X would have without bots.
Nice, stop rewarding the slop and hopefully the good streamers get to be in the top of the listings now.
I knew there were a lot of bots, but I’m pretty surprised to find out it was so many. I wonder if this will result in more real viewership for smaller channels.
Had a feeling
Looking forward to see how social blade represents the data.
Damn, throw it on the dead internet billboard. We got another one!
