Influencer Marketing: Viewbotting is Affecting ROI

Partnering with Twitch streamers has grown into one of the most effective ways to quickly get a new game in front of a large number of eyeballs. But now that the platform is so saturated, how do you control that uncontrollable viewcount number?  

In the midst of the pandemic, a little game called Among Us exploded to popularity seemingly out of nowhere. And it kind of was out of nowhere, a creator named Sodapoppin tried it out on stream and from there it snowballed into being hugely popular with both content creators and regular gamers stuck at home. 

With the boring drag of not being able to leave the house paired with the delay/cancellation of tons of movies and TV shows, Twitch experienced a year of unprecedented growth, with 26.5 million users visiting the site, a near 50% increase year over year. Aside from more viewers, the intrigue of making a living playing video games (and maybe becoming famous!) beckoned an influx of new streamers. Twitch was now holding gigantic viewership numbers and being recognized by mainstream media. 

All of this, of course, led to where we are now, with millions of dollars invested into these famous gamers in hopes to have a decent ROI. However, competitiveness among streamers now that the site is more saturated, has become increasingly intense over the past few years.Creators know that this is a numbers game -the higher views equal higher paychecks –  and whoever is towards the top is going to get the most sponsored activations.But how could they guarantee such a volatile ingredient of success?

Viewbotting is when a streamer artificially inflates their viewer count using fake, automated accounts (bots) instead of real people. This was always an issue on Twitch before the pandemic, but it was mostly swept under the rug and those who were accused never suffered consequences. Recently however, the discussions around viewbotting and who is taking part have become much more intense. Creators who do not viewbot, are rightfully saying that this is an extremely unfair and fake advantage and should be handled by Twitch. 

Veteran streamer KingGothalion sat down with Twitch CEO Dan Clancy back in 2023 to discuss the issue  and told him things would rapidly spiral out of control if viewbotting wasn’t addressed  soon. At the time, Clancy claimed that only ‘small’ streamers were viewbotting … not the more popular ones. 

Fast forward to 2026 and it is more and more apparent that some creators at the top of the directories are not holding that spot organically.The main issue is, it is almost impossible to track who is viewbotting and who is responsible. It is possible the creator is paying for their own viewbots, or a community member has bought viewbots for them.

Pro Tip: One way to try and see if a creator is falsifying their stats, is to visit their stream and see how slow their chat moves based on their viewercount, (ex: a chat with 10K viewers should be moving a good amount.)

As a company, you want to make sure your marketing budget is invested in the right places and will produce the best results. Reverb Games has their pulse on all things in the content creation sphere and is able to efficiently weed out anyone falsifying numbers, creating campaigns with realistic and attainable ROIs. It will be interesting to see what happens in the future and whether this will affect how many companies invest in Twitch to promote, as they seem to be paying little attention to the issue. For now, the burden of due diligence falls squarely on the brands and the marketers smart enough to know what to look for.

Twitch Viewbotting Isn’t Just Rumor, It’s a Platform-Level Issue; A note on our work to combat viewbotting, from CEO Dan Clancy: There’s been a lot of discussion recently about viewbotting on Twitch, and I wanted to share an update on our enforcement efforts. Viewbotting is bad for our business. We don’t benefit from it, and we believe it harms the creator ecosystem overall. However, effectively combatting viewbotting is challenging. As we deploy updates to our real-time detection algorithms, viewbotting companies quickly respond with updates to avoid detection. Also, our detection systems must be precise to ensure that legitimate viewers are appropriately counted. Today, we’re introducing a new enforcement type that we plan to roll out over the next few weeks. For channels identified as persistently viewbotting, we will apply a cap to the streamer’s CCV for a fixed period of time, on all of the Twitch surfaces. The cap will be based upon historical data regarding that creator’s non-viewbotted traffic. Repeated violations will result in longer penalties. Streamers will be notified when an enforcement is applied, along with the duration of the penalty, and can appeal through the appeals portal. While streamers will be notified, we will not make a follow-on announcement when we begin issuing these enforcements, and will not publicly share details about when and where these enforcements are applied. Unfortunately, providing details simply makes it easier for companies to work around our interventions. We believe this approach will help us make meaningful progress against viewbotting. We will continue refining our systems and expand when we apply these enforcements over time. – Dan Clancy