One of the most popular streamers on Twitch, Trainwrecks, has made a shocking claim about his fellow top streamers. During a recent stream, the popular and controversial streamer said that he’s been led to believe that 90 out of the top 100 streamers on the platform are “blatantly viewbotting.” As you may know, viewbotting is a substantial problem on the platform, so this is certainly within the realm of possibility. If it’s true, then the problem is much larger than originally thought and could have serious implications with advertising on the platform, the primary source of income for the Amazon-owned platform.
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“I’m under the impression, confidently, that, in the top 100, at least 90 out of 100 are not only blatantly viewbotting, but we’re talking massively viewbotting.” said Trainwrecks. “Because you can’t tell at that point, right?”
Trainwrecks continued: “For the longest time, I sat there thinking, ‘Why are these streamers with my viewership average or higher than me by 20, 30 thousand, why are they sitting there so worried about me? Why am I hearing all these things behind the scenes?ย
Providing some evidence, Trainwrecks said he was one of the only streamers with 99 percent logged-in viewership average. In other words, 99 percent of his viewers were logged-in, actual accounts. According to Trainwrecks, the majority of the biggest streamers on the platform were averaging somewhere between 45 percent to 85 percent. Obviously, the fewer logged-in viewers you have, the more it looks like you’re botting.ย Trainwrecks concludes by claiming that many of the top Twitch streamers aren’t as popular as they look on the surface.
It’s hard to decipher how much of this is pure speculation versus conclusions drawn from looking at data and information shared behind the scenes. Whatever the case, with the number of Twitch streamers that skyrocketed to fame in 2022 out of nowhere, there is certainly plenty of room for speculation. Of course, Twitch likely knows down to the individual metric how much truth there is to this. That said, if there’s any truth to it, it’s not going to share any of the information. As alluded to, if it’s revealed Twitch has a massiveย bot problem, it’s going to cause panic among advertisers.ย
H/T, Dexerto.