There's Something Suspicious About One of Twitch's Fastest-Growing Channels

One of Twitch's fastest-growing channels appears to have joined the elite of the streaming site [...]

By Russ Burlingame

One of Twitch's fastest-growing channels appears to have joined the elite of the streaming site largely due to suspicious activity that is almost certainly explained in two words: follower bots.

What is perhaps stranger is the fact that it the account's growth was so sudden and explosive that it seems like a foregone conclusion that it was going to be caught quickly, raising the question of what the point might be.

Streamer bloodymoshpit has had an account since 2015, but it had been largely inactive for the last year-plus. After streaming consistently for a few days and racking up some respectable numbers, the account's follower count jumped.

All of that you would likely expect.

What is less expected is the magnitude of the jump: according to SullyGnome (via Dexerto), the channel jumped from about 500 followers to 80,000 pretty quickly -- and then leapt to almost 300,000 before it plateaued.

All of this without most of those new subscribers actually watching content -- according to Twitch's growth standings, bloodymoshpit quickly became the site's second-fastest-growing channel...but still has only about 11 hours of streams and 11,000 total view hours. Those numbers sound more like somebody with 500 followers than a quarter million.

Twitch seems to have already caught on to whatever is happening; the account peaked at 297,000 followers, but is now down about 1% of that to 294,000. That is also the count it had earlier today when Dexerto broke down the numbers, suggesting that the astronomical growth rate has slowed to near zero.

For context: bloodymoshpit rapidly became Twitch's second-fastest-growing channel by raw numbers, and by percentage it was off the charts. Looking at a chart of the ten fastest-growing channels, most of them started with hundreds of thousands or millions of followers already, and are growing at a rate of around 10%. That is dwarfed by something like 50,000% by bloodymoshpit's growth rate.

Twitch, YouTube, and other ad-supported systems that pay elite users based on their traffic numbers routinely struggle with bots set up to inflate views and view hours, but follower bots are less common, and a swarm of follower bots of this magnitude in a short period of time is very rare.

At present, the account is still in good standing on Twitch, although it would not be particularly surprising if it were removed from the platform if it turns out that the streamer was behind a swarm of follower bots.

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