Twitch has a View Botting and Embedding Problem

Lately on social media, a lot of talk has been happening around the live streaming platform of Twitch regarding their issues with tackling the view botting and embedding problem on their live streaming service.  Although view botting and embedding are two different things, they are very often lumped together as they ultimately do similar things to artificially increase a streamers view count.  This has become a more and more prevalent conversation as recent top streamer Extra Emily accidentally shared a browser tab that had a view bot service on it.  As she is considered one of the larger creators and very often included in twitch promotions as one of the "faces" of the platform, the backlash has been severe and outrage high.

Embedding is what I am most familiar with as I too use to embed my stream in accordance with the twitch embedding policies.  The thing is, Twitch currently allows for embeds if they are a substantial part of a websites content and not hidden behind a very small pixel radius.  This means that if anyone goes to a website with an embedded media player from twitch and has the player on auto play, those website visitors will count as live viewers on the Twitch platform when the streamer is live and raise their ranking in the category that they are streaming in.  

While these are real people and real traffic to the website that the media player is on, the vast majority of these website views have no idea that they are watching a live stream simply by browsing the site of their choice.  They are unknowing participants most of the time.  This is why many streamers are calling for the complete removal of embeds as an option.  The only thing twitch really needs to do so stop this form of inflating views is simply turn off auto play on all embedded twitch media players.  It would be as simple as that.  Embedded media players from twitch do not earn revenue from ADs played.  I confirmed this myself on my own channel.

The more nefarious form of view botting however does earn AD revenue from the viewers because there are fake twitch accounts that actually enter a chat natively and even have AI that chats for them to make them look like real viewers.  As Artificial Intelligence gets more and more sophisticated, these bots also become more sophisticated and harder to distinguish from real viewers, and this is the biggest risk to twitch at the moment.  Those individuals view botting in this manner are not only inflated their viewer counts but are committing advertising fraud by earning AD revenue while doing it.

Twitch had this to say about the current discourse around view botting and embedded views in a twitter post (see below).

Additionally, Dan Clancy, the Twitch CEO also commented on additional discourse related to the post that Twitch made (see below).

It remains to be seen if the capping of views on offenders who historically view bot or embed will curb the activities of these offenders, but at least Twitch is trying to respond to this serious problem.  As much as I love Live Streaming, I do believe that Twitch and other live streaming platforms have an uphill battle.  I believe that YouTube may become the primary live streaming service in the near future, and I am even considering moving my own stream to YouTube since it will automatically save my video to the platform as soon as it is finished.  It may be the right time to consider moving over there as the other live streaming platforms get caught up in controversy.  In any event, I wish the best for the whole ecosystem because the creator economy is huge and provides a lot of income and joy for those who engage in it.

Until next time,

Blackboa