WTF is viewbotting?

In the robust and ever-changing creator economy, which is currently grappling with how to approach streaming as short-form content and clipping become more popular, viewbotting is quickly becoming a major issue. 

Why and how does it happen and who does it affect? 

WTF is viewbotting?

Viewbotting is when live streams get an influx of artificial viewers powered by bots. Companies offer viewbotting services, with AI recently helping make the fake accounts seem even more legitimate by imbuing them with personalities and interests. 

Some streamers may pay for these services to increase their viewership hoping to get on a platform’s home page. Twitch, for example, prioritizes view counts when putting livestreams on its homepage, posing a persistent discoverability problem for smaller streamers (something the platform has been working to fix for quite some time now). 

“People want to see what the most people are seeing, and platforms benefit from this through pushing advertisement inventory and data collection,” political streamer Austin “Gremloe” MacNamara told Digiday. “The end result is that creators trying to grow don’t have the resources to gain audiences unless they already have an established audience to migrate to platforms like Twitch.”

What is a viewbotting attack?

Some streamers are the targets of a viewbotting campaign, not the ones paying for them.

The viewbotting can be paid for by bad actors, whether they’re fans of a rival streamer or just internet users looking to cause chaos. Though it seems like more views would be a good thing, especially on a platform that struggles with discoverability, artificial views pose a major problem for streamers. 

Not only could they get their accounts banned for violating a platform’s terms of service (which we’ll get to later), but if a streamer’s viewer count varies wildly from day-to-day, it could harm their reputation as a content creator. 

How does viewbotting affect brands?

Viewbotting may also pose a problem for brands looking to work with streamers who earn a specific amount of views, whether that’s major streamers with tens of thousands live viewers or more mid-tier creators with just a few dozen. 

“In traditional digital media, fraud is largely treated as a transactional problem. Did the advertiser pay for invalid impressions? Were bots filtered? Did third-party verification catch the issue?” said Matt Barash, chief commercial officer at Nova Studio.

“But creator media introduces a different vulnerability,” he said. “Social proof is part of the product itself. If a creator appears to have 2 million viewers instead of 200,000, that doesn’t just distort reporting — it can influence sponsorship pricing, creator selection, budget allocation, and perceived market demand before a campaign ever runs.”

For Barash, viewbotting is less about ad fraud and more about “marketplace contamination,” which is a harder issue to audit. “You’re trying to validate the authenticity of the signals that shaped the buying decision in the first place,” he said. 

Both Twitch and YouTube assured Digiday that inflated live views aren’t conflated with paid advertising engagement. 

A YouTube spokesperson pointed to a Google Support page that details the two kinds of views measured in Google Ads: TrueView views and YouTube public views, with the former billable views and the latter not. 

“We’ve said very consistently that the systems we use to count views are completely separate from the systems that are in our advertising backend, as it relates to what advertisers are being charged for…advertisers,” Twitch’s chief product officer Mike Minton told Digiday. 

It’s not clear how these systems are designed to avoid viewbotting. 

How has viewbotting evolved?

According to a study by Streams Charts, viewbotting first surfaced pre-2016, with Twitch launching its first actions against the practice in the late 2010s. Since then, Twitch, Kick, and other livestreaming platforms have worked to crack down on viewbotting, and stamp out its different iterations. 

As Streams Charts’ study stated, earlier forms of viewbotting were more “crude scripts with rows and rows of silent, idle viewers.” Nowadays, however, AI-powered viewbot programs are built to “look alive” with varied behavior, shifting device fingerprints, and the ability to participate in conversations in livestream chats. 

This means platforms have to dedicate even more energy and resources to identifying viewbotting efforts. 

How are platforms cracking down on viewbotting?

YouTube spokesperson Boot Bullwinkle told Digiday that “authentic human engagement” is what underscores the YouTube ecosystem for everyone — creators, viewers, and advertisers alike.

“We have strict policies against fake engagement, including viewbotting, and use a combination of advanced detection systems and human review to verify that metrics are accurate,” he said.

On May 7, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy released a statement addressing viewbotting and detailing the platform’s plans to combat it on X. 

“Viewbotting is bad for our business,” the statement read. “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.”

The new enforcement type Twitch announced involves applying a cap to a streamer’s concurrent viewers for a fixed period of time, based on historical data regarding non-viewbotted traffic, with repeat offenders getting longer penalties. Clancy wrote that the platform “will not publicly share details about when and where these enforcements are applied” because “providing details simply makes it easier for companies to work around our interventions.”

For livestreamers, the platforms they create on, and the brands looking to work with them, viewbotting remains a major problem.