Nobody likes cheaters, and live-streaming is not an exception. While some streamers spend a lot of time and creative energy to attract audiences and brands, less honest content creators fictitiously inflate their online performance in order to be noticed faster in the market.
Over the last couple of days, several top streamers (including Gothalion, DrLupo, Asmongold and Pestily) drew attention to our Chrome extension, which you to get one very important indicator about any broadcast on the platform: the ratio of authorized viewers to the total number of broadcast viewers. With its help, one can indicate fraud streamers.
Authorized to All Viewers Ratio (or Auth/All Viewers) is the percentage of all viewers who are authorized/logged in on the platform during the stream.
So how does the ratio of authorized viewers to all viewers help determine whether real viewers are watching the broadcast? It’s very simple, the lower the percentage, the higher the likelihood that the broadcast is filled with bots or it’s a case of so-called “legal viewbotting”, when the broadcast is embedded on some highly trafficked site, and its visitors see the broadcast automatically. In any case, we are talking about people who are not engaged in the stream.
There are other cases that have already been noticed in the community: this is when the ratio of authorized viewers to all viewers exceeds 100%. At first glance, this is some kind of error, but in fact this is possible in a number of cases. Some of them were highlighted by Pestily in a twitter thread. Let’s summarize them:
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Viewbotting. An inflated figure may also indicate fraud, since bots may not even watch the broadcast, but be active in the chat.
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An inflated ratio can also be seen among streamers who host giveaways a lot or are included in Twitch Drops campaign(s). It is not necessary for viewers of such broadcasts to watch the stream, they just need to be present on the channel page: viewers can put the stream to the pause and just stick around on the page thus being tracked as an authorized user, but not an actual viewer.
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Another case is Twitch raids. The streamer who organizes the raid leads authorized users to another channel.
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One should also remember that Twitch has its own anti-viewbotting system. If 50 people access the broadcast from one IP address (for example, common office space), then only one actual viewer, but 50 authorized users will be tracked.
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An inflated ratio can also be caused by cases where a viewer watches many broadcasts at the same time using third-party services (for example, multitwitch). In this case, if one of the broadcasts is paused, then the user will be displayed as a chat participant, but not as an actual viewer.
One of the Streams Charts missions is to increase transparency in live streaming, and we are very glad to continue contributing to it. Those who are interested in a Chrome extension that can track the metric on any Twitch broadcast (and also has a plethora of other useful features) can install it by clicking here.
