Unsplash.com: ilgmyzin / Pexels: Burak The WeekenderTwitch viewership is trending downward across the board in the time since they began cracking down severely on viewbots, with an up to 24% reduction week over week. Twitch has since responded, claiming
Viewership on the livestreaming platform has been declining in general even if there are some high points like Ibai’s La Velada Del Ano event that draw people to the platform in droves, but seeing such a massive and sustained decrease in viewership is not normal.
While one dip in viewership can easily be written off, a general and noticeable drop after Twitch’s policy change likely means one thing: their crackdown on viewbots is working.
However, with that exposing how many viewers on the platform weren’t real people, a lot of the biggest Twitch streamers have taken a big hit to their viewership.
Twitch’s viewbot crackdown results in viewership dip
With viewbots, it’s important to note that literally anyone could pay to bot someone’s channel, and that bots aren’t all that expensive. Just because someone lost viewership in the crackdown doesn’t necessarily mean they were buying bots for themselves, and a streamer being mentioned for losing viewership in this article is by no means a pejorative toward streamers mentioned.
Starting with general Twitch viewership, it’s clear that there’s a downward trend that began on August 21. Before that, viewership was on par with if not a little higher than the week before.
Twitch TrackerThere’s a very clear and rapid downward trend across the board, with literal hundreds of thousands of viewers detracted from Twitch’s overall live viewership pool.
And, while some fluctuation is normal, there aren’t any massive outliers or Twitch events week over week that’d result in such a massive swing of viewership one way or the other. Yet, at its absolute lowest on Friday, August 22, viewership dropped to a staggering 24% lower than last week. Viewership was also 23% lower on Sunday, August 24, yet another big crater in viewership.
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Next, let’s look to one of the biggest streamers on Twitch: Asmongold.
His viewership has dropped off on a very similar curve, losing roughly 10-20% of his average viewership depending on the day. Again, there’s going to be some statistical anomalies depending on the contents of his stream, but the trend is downward.
Stats via Twitch TrackerIt’s clear as day that there’s been a pretty steady drop off on the exact same curve as Twitch’s overall downward trend. August 19 is an outlier considering he was restreaming Gamescom’s Opening Night Live. Leaving that off, he’s had a loss of around 10-20% on average, with an even bigger reduction in his peak viewership.
It’s not as if the streamers are happy about this, either. Tectone pointed out that his viewership has taken a hit but is also fluctuating rapidly as other people bot his stream, going from 3k viewers to 7k and rubber-banding back and forth as people send bots to his channel.
A few days of data is by no means conclusive, and more data will have to be gathered until it becomes apparent just how many Twitch viewers aren’t real people.
Twitch responds claiming viewership hasn’t dropped amid viewbot crackdown
Twitch has since responded to Dexerto and claimed that their viewership hasn’t dipped at all in the grand scheme of things, and that the data collected from third-party platforms isn’t accurate.
“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 claimed.
“We expect to see moderate fluctuations in view count as we implement our viewbot detection tools. However, view counts alone don’t represent how people watch and engage with content on Twitch. Factors like real daily visitors and hours spent watching are key and haven’t moved, as bots were never part of those calculations. We continue to see the same depth of engagement across our service.”
So, though streamer’s viewership counts have fluctuated in the time since they’ve been cracking down on botting for the platform, they claim that it hasn’t had any meaningful impact on how many users are actually watching streams and how they interact with their favorite streamers.
For more detail about Twitch’s viewbot detection and how it works, you can read our interview with them here.