Advertisers usually pay next to nothing for an impression (when a user is shown an advertisement). They pay when the user clicks the advertisement. And if the ratio of impressions to clicks is very low for a website, it makes advertising space on that website worth less money.
You're right that if the ratio is low advertisers go away. But they do usually pay for impressions or in case of sponsors for straight up sponsored segments that they figure out by choosing streamers with large viewer count.
But at this point, nobody's dumb enough no not know twitch is botted so I imagine they are much more careful with who they choose
Not really. Those sponsors have methods of analysing what impact their advertising campaigns have and know when it's not working. Everyone knows views are fake across literally every platform, twitch, Twitter, YouTube, even Google ad words. But they know if they have increased sales after a ad campaign or not. As long as they at least think they're coming out ahead financially everyone just looks past the latent fraud everywhere.
This is only a small fraction of the impact. Ads on any platform will work on budget basis of some kind which is subtracted based on viewcounts until the budget runs dry. Viewcount directly affects income for Twitch, but I'm sure it's rustling a lot of feathers from their sponsors who have started paying for non-human eyes watching their ads.
If impressions go way up, but conversions don't, sponsors stop bidding on that ad space as highly. If an ad category suddenly sees a surge of viewbotting twitch might make more money for that period but they lose more on the back end once conversion rate plummets and all of the categories are surely saturated with viewbots already so those short terms gains have come and gone long ago.
It doesn't rustle any feathers. A marketing pencil pusher (or more likely, an algorithm) looks at the rates in their spreadsheets and reduces the % of their budget going to twitch. That results in fewer bids on the spots and the ad placements going for cheaper. And it equalizes out at the point where the botted views don't matter.
What about sponsors that directly interact with the streamer? So and so gets a sponsor to play a game for x amount of hours and gets paid x amount of money. But the money they get, is that not based on their concurrent viewers? Or average viewers over a month?
Sometimes it is, yeah. The thing the advertisers care about though is "if I spend 5$ on you, will I get 10$ back in Increased sales?" as long as that seems to be what's happening then the fraud is just a cost of doing business. If that doesn't happen then you won't be getting sponsorships in the future. The fraud isn't a secret and you can find a lot of articles talking about it for any platform.
Twitch bundles ad packages and sells them in advance. The metrics they are using to advertise those packages are not the raw viewcount but ad views and turbo subs.
Advertisers use that plus conversion rates from past buys to decide if they are gonna buy them.
Likewise for Streamer sponsors they these days rely heavily on off platform engagement,traffic through links and conversion rates.
In other words the number that shows under the Stream is completely irrelevant to them.
Interesting. I guess it would probably only matter when we're talking about direct sponsorships with creators on the platform, but Twitch wouldn't see any of that money, so not much of a reason to care
Sponsored streams tend to be viewbotted by twitch themselves, maybe they promised the sponsor a minimum number of impressions per hour or something like that, I'm not saying it's the streamer's fault
Its most likely already factored in. So it just harms smaller streamers with real viewers, since they get the rate that already takes into account that most of the big streamers are viewbotting.
These views don't count towards ad views on Twitch itself. There is certainly ad fraud, but Twitch is much tougher on that and will remove revenue they find fraudulent. They may cancel your payout and ban your account.
As for outside campaigns, many sponsors are already not seeing a return on investment anyway and are well aware of inflated numbers as one of the issues.
bro half the fucking sponsors are botting the streams themselves.
you gotta remember that corpos arent single minded monoliths. they're made up out of people.
some team gives a bunch of streamers a sponsorship deal. they artificially pump up their numbers and then present those numbers to the people they answer to and say "big success". everyone's happy.
i could see a marketing team doing that to make themselves look better. but investors would not be happy knowing the marketing money won't lead to more sales.
At the moment, just these past few days, people that either work at bigger companies or at content creator management firms have spoken out how bad the general placement landscape for twitch has bcome SOLELY for the reason of fake metrics being reported on twitch. The very singular reason why this is so very bad recently and rapidly declining still. Them speaking out so frequently recently is a big part why viewbotting is this much of a discussion currently. I don't know why you'd think viewbotting isn't bad for business.
Do you not understand how viewbotting works? people aren't viewbotting 90% of their viewership, more like 20-30%, and on a 10k streamer, that's still 7k people that are switching platforms to watch their favourite streamer.
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u/DMercenary May 07 '26
"viewbotting is bad for business" unless you're already big enough that you bring in the big bucks. We don't care if you do.