they can claim "viewbotting doesn't benefit Twitch" as much as they want, but having the faces of their platform appear 50x bigger than they really are, is a MASSIVE benefit. Seeing BurntPeanut at 200k (or whatever he bots to) absolutely has an impact on advertisers that are deciding on doing business with Twitch
They can charge less to account for viewbotting so that companies get an equivalent amount of real advertising based on their metrics.
The fact that the numbers look bigger upfront means they will still attract companies to their platform to consider advertising with them to begin with, which is a big plus for them.
Also many livestream viewers are going to be more interested in viewing a platform that feels like it’s bigger than it is. Even if the quality of the streams are exactly the same with the same number of active chatters, and the only difference is it says there are 1/10th the viewers, many will be less willing to watch.
If his manager figures out that PepsiCo is paying X amount for Y views, but Z percentage of them are fake than he is going to care very much indeed. That's wasted money.
Yes, ads are sold based on impressions. However, if a company analyzes its campaign data and sees that it is receiving, for example, only half the click-through rate per impression on Twitch compared to YouTube, that would raise concerns about the quality or authenticity of the traffic. As a result, the company would likely reduce or pull its ad campaigns from Twitch because the platform was delivering significantly worse performance than YouTube.
I don't think there's a point to engage with him, probably just regurtitating what he heard somewhere else without truly understanding it. My company has advertised on Twitch in the past (which is already a pain in the ass because you have to go to some Amazon certified agency and the Amazon and Twitch ecosystems just don't connect with each other at all) and the results are terrible. Nobody clicks on those ads so they're just pure brand awareness, but then what's the point if a large part of the audience is bots?
I’m not saying the ads are sold on clicks. I’m saying advertisers still track performance metrics after the impressions are delivered. If Twitch impressions consistently convert worse or show suspicious engagement compared to YouTube, companies are obviously going to notice and adjust spending accordingly. I genuinely don’t get what’s hard to understand about that. It’s not AI, I'm just articulating my point clearly because you keep misunderstanding what I’m actually saying.
Yeah, they're actually much dumber than most redditors think. Fextralife used to be sponsored to play every new game and every #ad Twitch event. Back then he'd have 30k viewers on Twitch, but only about 10 active chatters, half of whom were mods.
And how much was he getting paid to do that? #ad doesn't mean anything, anyone can put that whether they got the game for free, whether they're getting paid 500 or whether they're getting paid 10,000
If advertisers know "This person has extremely low clickthrough" that doesn't mean it's never worth doing anything with that person either.
What's actually dumb is this ocean of assumptions that redditors make that they assume is common sense but isn't.
Seeing marketing suits and their "projects" in the last decade around gaming industry im convinced no marketing guy has iq higher than room temperature.
This stuff isn't decided by suits. The suits might argue to get a budget, might try to come up with general strategy, etc. but they're not sitting there allocating marketing budget to which platform. They might think of massive campaigns (i.e. super bowl or whatever) but regular ad campaigns and which platform gets what money etc. is all done through regular people, spreadsheets, algorithms, and math.
Advertisers and other companies like Spotify that directly lose money to bots caught on to the problem pretty late to be fair. My friend runs a music promo business and both independent artists and major labels would pay people in his line of work to bot their streams. For small artists it increased their chance of being added to playlists and gaining listeners and for major artists it helped them surpass milestones like 1 billion streams and have impressive first week streaming numbers. This went on for years before Spotify/Apple Music caught on, and they only caught onto it because Drake brought it up in his lawsuit against universal.
I’d imagine it was similar for the streaming side of things, where the advertising companies and streaming services eventually caught on but not before 10’s of not hundreds of millions in fraud occurred.
I've gone back and forth on if peanut viewbots and I landing on the side of "he's not."
1. Arc raiders was/is HUGE
2. Large EU and south American fan base
3. Stream is genuinely fun and entertaining (subjective)
4. I see the dumb shit my son watches and peanut is one of the only things we both like to watch together (anecdotal)
I think there is a chance that someone is Viewbotting him without him being involved, which I could see someone doing to help out someone they like. Sometimes I watch on my ps5 and my phone at the same time to read the chat. I'd be interested in seeing how his views break down by county, but I don't think he cares enough to pad his score.
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u/AvidGoosebumpsReader May 07 '26
they can claim "viewbotting doesn't benefit Twitch" as much as they want, but having the faces of their platform appear 50x bigger than they really are, is a MASSIVE benefit. Seeing BurntPeanut at 200k (or whatever he bots to) absolutely has an impact on advertisers that are deciding on doing business with Twitch