Twitch has a monthly traffic volume of more than a billion, with the average user checking a minimum of 3-4 pages per visit, meaning that they’re watching around 2-3 streams per visit. Content creators with original content and huge charisma can gather an audience related to their niche, which can make it easier to segment and sell products to them through influencers or promotions.
To increase a channel’s value, unscrupulous content creators might use bots and cheating strategies. Ad campaigns and promotions are incredibly inefficient when there are bots in the audience. Checking for cheating on Twitch channels will help businesses save a lot of money. This article will teach you and others how to detect if a Twitch channel is cheating or using bots.
Why streamers tend to boost their Twitch channel
The value of a channel depends on the number of viewers it has, including subscribers. During a stream, the channel is ranked in the search results according to the number of viewers it has, and the advertising pricing and subscription value are calculated from that total number of viewers.
Direct advertising pricing depends on the average number of views the channel has, which motivates streamers to boost up their indicators, and also motivates them to cheat Twitch and trick advertisers with bots.
Advertisers and other content creators should check the channels as it will help businesses reduce the pricing or detect streamers that are cheating using Twitch bots.
Detect if your channel has bots
If you’re checking a VOD (a Twitch stream offline) you can see the number of followers and views of the complete stream. The screenshots below show where to look.
During the stream, the number of simultaneous online viewers, the total time of the stream, donations, and the total amount and frequency of comments are available for you to see. At the same time, the audience tends to change. The average viewer spends around 10 minutes on Twitch, according to SimilarWeb.
With a constant online audience of 2K viewers, the number of views can exceed the 10K mark. Based on these indicators, you can check if your channel has bots or if it’s cheating Twitch in any way.
Method 1: The views-followers ratio should not vary a lot. Channels with many thousands of followers/subscribers would need to have at least a ratio of 50%. Not all subscribers come to watch every stream, but among the viewers, not all of them are necessary followers. This method is not 100% accurate. For streamers that broadcast different games or topics, the number of views can vary depending on the game or genre.
Method 2: A boost in views, this is the most obvious indicator of cheating Twitch or that your channel has bots. Try to evaluate how long the streams last, a stream lasting 2, 4, and 8 hours will have different amounts of viewers. A one-time jump upward is not suspicious, as the streamer could have been lucky.
Method 3: Developing and active channels experience a constant natural increase in views. It might be slow, but it’s there, but if the increase is too fast, or not happening at all, the channel is just ruined.
Method 4: A constant decrease in the total number of viewers can also indicate cheating and bots.
Method 5. You can perform a short audit of the subscribers. Bots get used to subscribing to several channels, something that doesn’t happen often with real users as they tend to be very loyal.
Method 6: Sharps users getting into the stream immediately can suggest bots, this is because when a streamer starts a broadcast, it sends a notification to their followers and subscribers, and they join slowly, if a stream starts with 0 viewers and suddenly it gets to 1000+ viewers, is very probable they’re using bots to cheat twitch.
Method 7: Among all the viewers on a stream, around 60% should be registered. Twitch regularly creates incentives for registration, along with limiting the functionalities for unregistered users. Advertisers are only interested in this kind of users.
Method 8: On small Twitch channels (50-500 viewers), around 10-20% are the ones commenting and using the chat. As the amount of viewers increases, the percentage decreases a lot as chatting in a flying chat is simply uncomfortable. This means that for every 1000 viewers, you can expect 20-25 people using the chat.
This also depends on the content, for example, e-sports silent players will be more focused on showing their skills than talking, and their audience will be the same.
Method 9: Valuable comments. Bots usually comment, but the sentences make no sense with the context.
Method 10: The lack of donations on a stream also indicates the presence of bots as they don’t donate.
Using cheat checking services
You can check if you have bots on your Twitch channel using the Check Bots service. It checks for the activity of the followers and subscribers, along with checking if the users are in the database of bots. The main issue with these kinds of services is that bots already know their algorithm and bypass them.
What if there are bots in my Twitch Channel?
There can be cases where competitor streamers can be involved in cheating Twitch with bots. In most cases, this is not a problem for you, especially if the advertising network is already aware of it. Luckily for you, Twitch doesn’t ban for bots, but it affects you in other ways that will harm your progress.