Twitch viewership is trending downward across the board in the time since they began cracking down severely on viewbots, fluctuating from a 4% to 23% reduction week over week.
Viewership on the livestreaming platform has been declining in general even if there are some high points like Ibai’s La Vida Del Ano event that draw people to the platform in droves, but seeing such a massive and sustained decrease in viewership is not normal.
While one dip in viewership can easily be written off, a general and noticeable drop after Twitch’s policy change likely means one thing: their crackdown on viewbots is working.
However, with that exposing how many viewers on the platform weren’t real people, a lot of the biggest Twitch streamers have taken a big hit to their viewership.
Twitch’s viewbot crackdown results in huge viewership reduction
With viewbots, it’s important to note that literally anyone could pay to bot someone’s channel, and that bots aren’t all that expensive. Just because someone lost viewership in the crackdown doesn’t necessarily mean they were buying bots for themselves, and a streamer being mentioned for losing viewership in this article is by no means a pejorative toward streamers mentioned.
Starting with general Twitch viewership, it’s clear that there’s a downward trend that began on August 21. Before that, viewership was on par with if not a little higher than the week before.
The faded green line is last week’s viewership, while the bright one is this week’s
There’s a very clear and rapid downward trend across the board, with literal hundreds of thousands of viewers detracted from Twitch’s overall live viewership pool.
And, while some fluctuation is normal, there aren’t any massive outliers or Twitch events week over week that’d result in such a massive swing of viewership one way or the other. Yet, at its absolute lowest on Sunday, August 24, viewership dropped to a staggering 23% lower than usual for the platform. And it isn’t because records got broken last week.
Next, let’s look to one of the biggest streamers on Twitch: Asmongold.
His viewership has dropped off on a very similar curve, losing roughly 10-20% of his average viewership depending on the day. Again, there’s going to be some statistical anomalies depending on the contents of his stream, but the trend is downward.
Stats via Twitch TrackerIt’s clear as day that there’s been a pretty steady drop off on the exact same curve as Twitch’s overall downward trend. August 19 is an outlier considering he was restreaming Gamescom’s Opening Night Live. Leaving that off, he’s had a loss of around 20-30% of his peak viewership compared to the past few weeks.
It’s not as if the streamers are happy about this, either. Tectone pointed out that his viewership has taken a hit but is also fluctuating rapidly as other people bot his stream, going from 3k viewers to 7k and rubber-banding back and forth as people send bots to his channel.
A few days of data is by no means conclusive, and more data will have to be gathered until it becomes apparent just how many Twitch viewers aren’t real people. For now, though, it’s clear that a sizeable portion of the platform’s viewership is made up of bots, and that there may be large streamers who used them to artificially bump up their numbers.
