There’s an open secret among users of Twitch, the Amazon-owned video streaming service used mostly for e-sports streaming: They can embed their streams onto third-party websites to inflate the number of views they get, sometimes exponentially. With this technique, Twitch creators can covertly add tens of thousands of viewers. These viewers are often unaware they are being counted as they casually browse other sites, looking for gaming tips. But for many streamers the value of these fake views outweighs the costs of peer disapproval, as the extra viewers bolster their standings in Twitch’s rankings, potentially attracting more legitimate (and active) viewers, sponsors, and ad revenue.
This practice, known as “legal view botting” (as opposed to illegal view botting, which involves buying fake views), could also benefit Twitch, as the company makes money from advertisers and subscriptions. Though Twitch says that it is “always investigating artificially inflated viewers,” these views may be counted when determining how much advertisers must pay. A Twitch spokesperson did not respond to Fortune’s query about the impact of fake views on advertiser payments.
Now a number of Twitch streamers are calling for an end to the practice in a grassroots effort to clean up the platform, in one case offering to pay streamers who allegedly use the hack to stop doing it. “It's just yucky and deceptive and @Twitch you should really do better,” tweeted an esports star who goes by Pestily and who offered three streamers $2,000 weekly to stop using embedded streams to curb these allegedly egregious offenders. “They come across as a con artist deceiving people.”
A Twitch spokesperson told Fortune that embeds are designed to enable companies and streamers to share their content through additional channels, using the example of a charity embedding the feed of a Twitch streamer raising money for its cause. This Twitch spokesperson did admit that there are some circumstances in which embed players show a disparity between the number of people viewing and the number of people participating in the chat, an indicator of phony view counts.
“Not only does it hurt fellow creators, but also it defrauds the entire influencer marketing sector,” says Fortnite and Destiny 2 streamer Gothalion, who has nearly 1 million Twitch subscribers. He told Fortune that he knew of a marketer who’d been fired for leading an underperforming campaign with a Twitch creator who had illicitly boosted viewership numbers and inflated the amount of money sponsors paid him. “A lot of these folks sell their embedded metrics as organic, which in turn, has hurt that market for a lot of people.”
There is no public data showing the pervasiveness of embedded streams, which usually involves users placing tiny pixels on their personal websites that feature game guides, known as wikis. Twitch declined to share data with Fortune about the embedding, but said that the vast majority of streamers use the embed player as intended. Anecdotally, Gothalion estimates that embedded streams can bolster viewership by 80%, though the streamer believes that only 5% of streamers are cheating/using subterfuge to inflate the number of viewers they have.
Still, Twitch’s seemingly loose regulation of fake views has turned the practice into a cottage industry. A Google search for “Twitch legal view botting” returns results from an array of companies with names like ViewBots, TwitchBoost, Streambot, Stream Chaos Bot, Twitch View Bot, and ViewerApps that charge one-time and subscription fees for fake views of Twitch streams. A Twitch spokesperson declined to comment on this point.
Other Twitch streamers are more sanguine because they believe the embedders will encounter karmic retribution later. “At a certain point, the benefit stops,” says streamer Ecdycis about people who use embeds to bolster view counts. “Some people who have really high viewership don’t get high ad deals.”
