- Twitch’s new anti-bot system caused viewer counts to nosedive across hundreds of channels, with some losing over half their displayed audience.
- Channels running 24/7 reruns saw the biggest drops, with Mira falling from 2,000+ to under 200 viewers overnight.
- The cleanup affects sponsorship deals and ad rates since brands have been paying premium prices for audiences that were partially fake.
If the antibot sweeps keep going and numbers keep plummetting, it’s gonna be lots of fun for the sponsors in the next contract revision with the streamers.
Seems like this would be a boon to those who have actual audience, like they should be able to command higher returns?
In an honest world, yes. But this looks like a situation where the sponsors have the power and can use it to fuck over the streamers.
Sponsors probably knew the bots were there and were factoring that into their cost already, but now they can take advantage and pay less. Sponsors will probably argue something like:
“we were lied to and overpaid. We will graciously pay you the same per viewer rate and not reduce the amount to recoup our excess payments for bots in the past.”
And in theory, the rational free market would keep this from happening because sponsors should be competing for content creators (and vice versa), but the sponsors are the ones with the money and structure to win. They will collude (directly or indirectly) in order to pay less. The less-organized content creators will lose.
Sounds like they need a union.