You’ve probably mumbled “there’s no way this streamer has 20,000 viewers” to yourself at some point. And now, we might find out soon enough if that’s true thanks to new regulations unveiled by the Federal Trade Commission today.
The FTC has published a “final” ruling on purchasing AI comments and reviews for products, strictly prohibiting the practice in the U.S. While most of the rules target reviews and testimonials for products, there’s also an interesting addition about social media indicators: “The final rule prohibits anyone from selling or buying fake indicators of social media influence, such as followers or views generated by a bot or hijacked account.”
That definitely seems to implicate stream viewership numbers as companies and esports organizations often tout their overall viewership numbers to media companies and prospective investors alike. If correct, it could mean any U.S. based streamers who are view-botting will need to clean up their act quickly.
Just today, a press release and blog posted by Stream Hatchet touted FaZe Clan’s viewership numbers, showing how that metric is clearly still valued in the content creation business. View-botting, or purchasing a service to send bot accounts to inflate viewership numbers, intentionally obscures real viewership counts and can enable streamers and orgs that buy said bots to artificially inflate their reach on platforms like Twitch, YouTube, and Kick.
View-botting has been a controversial practice for quite a while now, with accusations of botting often lobbed at popular streamers who seem fishy, or from one aggrieved streamer to another content creator in the midst of arguments.
Streamers who are botting often have large viewer counts but little to no activity in their chat, as well as strange underlying performance metrics such as not gaining or even losing followers while sitting near the top of a game category on a given platform. If a person has thousands of real people watching their stream, they almost definitely should have an active chat, and no following or subscription activity is simply bizarre. Either they’ve created the strangest streaming community in existence or they might actually be botting.
So if you notice any streamer’s viewership counts take a sudden and drastic dip in the coming months, it might be some food for thought on the validity of those viewers. And all it took was the government possibly making it illegal.
