How to spot a viewbotted channel using metrics!

How to determine if a channel is being viewbotted using metrics!

Since I keep finding myself getting annoyed with ignorant people who accuse my channel of viewbotting, here is a good way to check if channel is being viewbotted. It basically involves concurrent viewer numbers vs pageviews. Take how many average viewers that the channel had for the day then compare it to the amount pageviews of the same day.  If average viewers is greater then pageviews this may be a good sign something fishy is occuring with the channel.



Here is a example from a broadcaster who is a long time viewbotter. This screenshot here shows the average viewers during the broadcast.

As you can see in this screenshot, they enabled the viewbots and the channel shoots up to 2,500 viewers and stays that way thru out the broadcast. Looking at past days its exactly the same metric, they turn on the stream, a couple minutes past and boom straight to 2,500.

Here shows you how many pageviews they have been getting, when you see pageviews being lower then the total amount of average viewers its a good sign the channel is being viewbotted.  To make sure this isnt some sort of people just leaving the channel open on a browser and their pageview thus not being counted, check the channel when its not broadcasting and observe to see if there is any logged in accounts.  In this broadcasters case there would have to be 1,000+ people leaving this channel open on there computer / mobile / tablets for weeks on end which is close to impossible.

Another way I know for a fact this channel has been viewbotting is because a admin did a temp ban shutdown of the channel to which this broadcaster just created another channel and reenabled the viewbots on the other one and continue on. They had a backup channel ready to go, switch the bots to the new one and in seconds they were back in business.

Now lets compare this to my channel's metrics.

My average viewers counts is like a roller caster, swings up and down. Its generally never really steady unless I'm playing a small indie game.

Here is pageviews, as you can see for a small channel of 100 to 300 ish viewers, I have a extreme amount of pageviews.  Why would that be the case? Simple because I do alot of embedding, as more people check the pages that have the stream embedded on it will generate a pageview. My pageviews out number my average viewers by many folds over which is a indicator that my channel is not viewbotted.

Another thing to note for broadcasters who embed is that the viewer counter is delayed.  It does not updated in realtime, always keep this in mind.

In a previous post, I've mentioned some bad metrics people have been using to guess if a channel is being viewbotted.  But in the end, the only 100% sure way to know if a channel has been viewbotting is getting your hands on internal metrics that only Twitch.tv has access to in terms of IP addresses and other stats. I hope Twitch figures out a way to put a end to this ongoing issue, lets see what happens 2016!