Twitch responds as viewbots rival Netflix viewership with millions of fake hours watched 

A new report on viewbotting has revealed that Twitch has had 30 million hours of fake watch time from botted viewers, while Kick is at 20 million. However, the Amazon-owned platform is working on clamping down.

Viewbotting isn’t a new thing on the internet. Content creators have purposefully used bots in the past to inflate their following and put eyes on their stuff. However, it has come under the spotlight again in recent weeks, especially on Twitch.

The Amazon-owned platform has seen a decline in viewership since cracking down on viewbots, including reaching its lowest monthly viewing figures since 2020. Twitch has downplayed the claims of it being “free fall,” however.

“Our viewership is not in free fall, especially among the millions of community channels that are core to Twitch viewership. We’ve seen some misinformation swirling, and a lot of that misinformation includes data pulled from third-party sources. Those numbers are incorrect and are not from Twitch,” they told Dexerto back in August.

Twitch viewbots match Netflix for fake watch time

Twitch has been working on additional viewbot detection tools; however, according to Stream Charts & Audiencly, there have still been enough fake watch hours to match Netflix.

According to their new figures, suspicious Twitch streams generated over 30 million fake watch hours, which is comparable to the weekly viewership of a top series on Netflix. Kick also clocked in 20 million fake watch hours too. 

As they noted in late August, more than 41,000 Twitch channels with 50+ average viewers were flagged with at least one “suspicious” stream of viewbotting. They reiterated that in their new white paper, claiming over 4,400 streamers showed “persistent signs of viewbotting” too.

Unsplash.com: Possessed Photography / ilgmyzin

Twitch addressed Stream Charts’ findings, telling them: “We’re talking openly about our viewbot detection work because we think it is an important conversation. 

“As we have with prior updates, we’ll continue to update our community on the improvements we make to our detection tools. We agree that transparency in this area is really important.”

They also noted: “This isn’t a short-term effort. We see this as a long-term effort, and we’ve been investing in this area for some time. We are focused on building solutions and improving our detection tools.”

These changes are something that Twitch have promised for a while, so it remains to be seen as to when they’ll happen.