- 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.
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.
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.
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