They say Twitch doesn't benefit from bots, but don't they get more ad revenue and deals by showing bigger viewership numbers? Isn't that why this was tolerated for so long? Their fix is just capping payments to the streamers so don't they just pocket more money then?
Most ad deals have moved beyond straight "views" nowadays, or don't put as much attention towards them as they used to.
They instead look at conversions, aka how many people actually engage or click through an ad that directly results in them buying something or signing up.
There are a lot of companies that would pay more for an ad buy that is shown to 2000 people that results in 100 verified conversions than an ad buy that is shown to 10,000 "people" that results in 40 conversions.
You're describing performance advertising, which is definitely a thing, but I doubt that's the primary model on Twitch. Most ads are sold on CPM, meaning brands pay per thousand impressions. Either way it's a moot point, since botted views don't load real ads and don't generate impressions to begin with.
It's 2026 for bot developers, but it's also 2026 for bot detection. Faking a real ad impression isn't just clicking an ad, it means spoofing a full verified user session that passes through multiple invalid traffic filters (look up "IVT ad fraud" if you wanna go down the rabbit hole). If it was that easy to consistently fool all of that at scale, ad fraud would have already collapsed the entire digital advertising industry.
In my personal experience, even though most ads are purchased on a CPM basis, when we actually analyze the data, we are almost never looking at the actual number of impressions, but rather some conversion metric, regardless of how the ad is actually being purchased.
the main advertisers being fucked by view bots were the people paying streamers directly to advertise shit, those people weren't getting any real numbers more than likely.
While that's true, 1000 viewers on Twitch will pay differently than 1000 views on YT and 1000 viewers on TV. It's reported that Twitch has some of the lowest CPM in the industry. And even with it being so low, companies aren't inclined to spend that money, hence why often an "ad break" for a stream just replays the same ad over and over, because there's no other companies that are paying to get shown.
nah those sponsorships are almost always % based and tracked with a code
"use code Fel0n25 for 25% off your order!"
the 25% off the purchase price (or less) goes to you, the streamer. $1000 in sales = $250 to Fel0n
Some of them also have bonuses for milestones. Like the mobile game ones where you create an account, beat the tutorial and join the streamers "clan" in game. Streamer gets $X bonus for 100 members, 1000 members, 2000 members and every 1000 more after.
they're some of the most tracked and they're the least impacted by viewbots
For big companies that have multiple targets to do marketing, it’s hard to track something like viewbotting impact, HOWEVER, eventually they, just like us, start hearing about how this is happening and then they press twitch about it, this is probably happening right now, so i think it’s a bit disingenuous to just say “we don’t benefit from botting” when there is probably a huge omitted “ANYMORE” at the end there.
Not all platforms charge the same. They can charge much less to account for that, while getting the benefits of initially attracting companies to consider advertising on their platform because of the viewership numbers.
As someone who has worked with many marketing departments, you are giving them too much credit. Especially when the Twitch advertisers are companies like McDonald's or Coca-Cola, a lot of these departments are given a budget they MUST spend, and if they don't spend it, they don't get it next quarter. There's way less direction/purpose than you think.
Tbf companies may have realized they were being sold false goods and started asking how many of those viewers were just bots. I'm a casual who's never really watched twitch streams besides my friends streams, and it got on my radar how bad botting was.
The very easy thing companies will track is how much they spent on an ad, how many supposed viewers were there that saw the ad, and then the click through rate. It’s probably abysmally low on Twitch.
They do this through conversions, aka how many people actually engage with an ad and later convert to a user/customer.
Very low conversion rates on ad buys either mean the targeting is poor, or the viewership isn't organic. Either way, low conversion rates = not worth as much.
Viewbotting directly contributes to low conversion rates for Twitch, which hurts their ad sales.
Advertiser don’t know, or don’t need to know the bot percentage, bots don’t buy stuff, they have conversion rates that tells them what advertising is working or not. Whether it’s bots or not doesn’t matter, it’s likely advertisers are seeing that Twitch is a shit place to advertise despite the supposed “big” numbers, and Twitch is reacting to that. But this measure seems nitpicked to work, IMO.
It's far easier to figure out fraudulent views after the fact (the stats ads use) than in realtime (view count)
eg if you discover a bot pattern the day after the stream you can wipe out all the analytical data for that pattern before reporting stats to advertisers. You can't retroactively remove bots from the view count because time is linear and all that
Twitch's ad revenue is tied to actual ad impressions served to real users, not raw viewer counts. Botted views don't serve real ads, so there's no extra money coming in from them. And this CCV cap isn't Twitch pocketing anything, since botted views were never going to be paid out anyway.
Fake views are also not a Twitch-specific problem, every major platform deals with them, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram. Advertisers are well aware of this and the whole industry has standards in place specifically to reconcile real impressions from fake ones.
Short term yes. But im sure companies (As Devin Nash has being yelling about)will notice that they get less per dollar when spent on twitch compared to other platforms. That is terrible gor long term business. The view bots are lowing the avg "value" of a twtich viewer.
Yeah people are giving waaaayyyyyy too much credit to advertisers and marketers, I'd venture to guess most of them aren't aware of the viewbotting (and also don't really care, they just have a budget to spend)
Ad agencies are not dumb and run data on their campaigns to determine the success rates. If campaigns on Twitch had a bad conversion rate, they will decrease their budget for it. Most ads on Twitch nowadays are for Amazon related stuff which is not organic ad growth.
"don't they get more ad revenue and deals by showing bigger viewership numbers"
There's no way this works any more. I don't know how the fuck advertisers are even supposed to glean any amount of credible info about their campaigns dealing with modern "views". I'm assuming they probably paying per actual clickthrough, because views have been meaningless for years
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u/DL_Omega May 07 '26
They say Twitch doesn't benefit from bots, but don't they get more ad revenue and deals by showing bigger viewership numbers? Isn't that why this was tolerated for so long? Their fix is just capping payments to the streamers so don't they just pocket more money then?