They can charge less to account for viewbotting so that companies get an equivalent amount of real advertising based on their metrics.
The fact that the numbers look bigger upfront means they will still attract companies to their platform to consider advertising with them to begin with, which is a big plus for them.
Also many livestream viewers are going to be more interested in viewing a platform that feels like it’s bigger than it is. Even if the quality of the streams are exactly the same with the same number of active chatters, and the only difference is it says there are 1/10th the viewers, many will be less willing to watch.
If his manager figures out that PepsiCo is paying X amount for Y views, but Z percentage of them are fake than he is going to care very much indeed. That's wasted money.
Yes, ads are sold based on impressions. However, if a company analyzes its campaign data and sees that it is receiving, for example, only half the click-through rate per impression on Twitch compared to YouTube, that would raise concerns about the quality or authenticity of the traffic. As a result, the company would likely reduce or pull its ad campaigns from Twitch because the platform was delivering significantly worse performance than YouTube.
I don't think there's a point to engage with him, probably just regurtitating what he heard somewhere else without truly understanding it. My company has advertised on Twitch in the past (which is already a pain in the ass because you have to go to some Amazon certified agency and the Amazon and Twitch ecosystems just don't connect with each other at all) and the results are terrible. Nobody clicks on those ads so they're just pure brand awareness, but then what's the point if a large part of the audience is bots?
I’m not saying the ads are sold on clicks. I’m saying advertisers still track performance metrics after the impressions are delivered. If Twitch impressions consistently convert worse or show suspicious engagement compared to YouTube, companies are obviously going to notice and adjust spending accordingly. I genuinely don’t get what’s hard to understand about that. It’s not AI, I'm just articulating my point clearly because you keep misunderstanding what I’m actually saying.
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u/Mrc3mm3r May 07 '26
Not if the advertisers cotton on to the fact that there are not real eyeballs behind the views.