How Legal Viewbots Thrive on Twitch

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In this video we get into a little known technique called "embedding" where you can drive viewers to your Twitch streams by hosting your livestream on other websites. Twitch is okay with this sort of viewership inflation. Though there are entire teams who are using high Page Rank websites to bring viewers in and inflate them in their game categories.

The basic concept of an embed is to put a video on your website and have it play your live stream. People coming into the website for any reason count as an unregistered viewer on Twitch. Twitch then counts that as a viewer. The website can be about anything (news, gaming, literally anything) but as long as there is one pixel of an autoplaying stream on the website, it counts as a view in a Twitch stream.

So here's how an embed strategy can play out:
1) Group of Twitch Streamers has access to a popular website.
2) They embed a one-pixel, autoplaying, 1% volume stream on the website.
3) They rotate the streams between them, gaining passive viewership for each stream.
4) ??
5) Profit

What are your feelings on this form of inflating viewer counts? Do you think Twitch should stop embeds?

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Video Edited by: Laggex

#Twitch #Streaming #DevinNash

[Excalibur]

Once he opened Notepad I knew I was dealing with a professional

[Gunthr]

My brother Wuqhwqhuqe takes offense to this.

[matthewskullblood]

ocassionally type LUL or some other emote


so like 99% of the people on twitch

[emilep]

Dammit is this why was taken as a name on twitch? Ughhhh

[jiraiYT]

"How do we know you're not botting* right now?"
"Youd never know" - Mr Nash

[jakesweet]

typing in notepad like the old school youtube

[changg]

Overwatch league actually used this a lot to boost numbers and seem like a more enticing investment.

[Balance_Of_Life]

I got an ad for Twitch Growth (Bots) while watching this.

[Eddy-dkug]

“I don’t viewbot cause my dad told me not to” - Grown Man

[depressedonion]

Interesting. Was watching an ESO streamer "Fengrush" and saw he had about 3k-5k viewers but with the chat of a 200 viewer andy.

[LordPenguinVR]

What if a stream was imbeded on the frontpage of Google. Imagine the views

[TheJavaServer]

"I could do so much evil" [Nash, 2019]

[willyamacaronie]

I've seen so many different streamers just say "Someone view botted me, I have reported it to twitch and that's all I can do". And they get away with it

[MakusinMeringue]

HorseBatteryStapler

He’s seen the XKCD comic “Entropy”.

[xiri]

When you were talking about 1 pixel small sound embeds, i was reminded of every time i hear a hiss in my headphones while on a site that is not supposed to be playing sound.


The hiss is from something playing in the background at an inaudible volume for you to hear the data of what is playing but you can definitely hear the noise generated by the presence of something playing. Much like how RTX looked while unable to trace all the rays on a reflection, you got a static-y looking reflection. Like an old TV antenna static between available channels. Now its is reduces signification by software calculation, you don't see this static much anymore.


This is true for anything playing sound turn it down low enough you cant hear its all you will hear is a hiss.

[kruptTV]

perhaps a feature to show "Places this stream is embedded" so then we can quickly see

[TheHivenst]

So i use to embed my stream on two sites a gaming blog and a ARPG site for path of exile, during that time I was hovering 80-100 viewers fairly consistently with around 20 active viewers. This was probably the fastest most inflated growth my channel ever saw and I made quite a few long lasting viewers but dear lord the streaming community around me made it known real quick they didn't appreciate it and I removed the embeds.


Last year around this time I had multiple top streamers in the category attempt to report me for "Viewbotting" I reached out to twitch and they stated embeds not the same thing and told the other streamers to stop harassing me and basically gave me a clean slate but the back lash and complexities defiantly didn't feel worth.



Its such a powerful tool to leverage getting a stream viewable but I agree its no substitute for actual viewership.

[Shaijn]

I remember youtube having this exact same problem with embedded players and ads and i think it is was one of the contributing factors along with adblockers becoming common place, and some of the complete junk and scams people could buy google adsense space for that lead to ad revenue on youtube tanking for all except the most immense channels.

[paposensei]

know wonder they ignored me i said i am new they just talk random that dont make sense lol

[DracoTheBlack]

Relatable, I work in security and the things I could get away with if I was a less moral person are concerning...

On topic; I think 90% of the blame for view botting is on Twitch. They are such an active obstacle to people succeeding on their platform that it is easy for people to excuse any potential harm they are doing to Twitch itself and the harm being done to other streamers is negligible because being on the 6th row or the 12th makes no difference anyways...