When external Influencers start to censor!

How a powerful external influencer starts to censor?
As reported a couple months ago on this blog, one of the biggest external influencers which is OWNED BY TWITCH has been promoting twitch streams on their wiki network. The more popular a wiki is on their network, the more traffic and embedded viewership it generates for Twitch streamers.

Some of the most popular Wiki's on that network include but are not limited to the following;

• Minecraft
• Terraria
• Ark

The way they pick which streamer to promote depends on placement on the game directory. For instance, on the Terraria wiki, whatever stream is in the top spot (of the terraria directory on twitch) will get most of the traffic that is generated from this 3rd party embed on the Terraria wiki.

Now this sounds like great for getting additional exposure for your stream right? Yup it is and I wrote about that here - Free Channel Traffic / Free Views

And here is how the censorship starts due to complaints from streamers vs streamers.

My channel broadcasts 24/7 using the rerun feature that is provided by Twitch. I like to play sandbox games on my stream and sometimes do play through runs of games. I broadcasting each day for around 5 to 8 hours then run reruns until I stream again the next day. A month ago, I was streaming Terraria which is one of the games that is being VERY LARGELY influenced by this 3rd party. A majority of the streamers who regularly stream that game do not have the reach in views that my channel generates daily. So what happen was as soon as I took the top spot in the directory, a huge chuck of the 3rd party embedding traffic was being sent to my channel which made it very difficult for other channels to overtake the top slot on the directory. The "free channel traffic" was gone for them and they didnt like it at all.

Without the 3rd party embedding support for Terraria, its overall viewership is alot lower. Estimated additional concurrent viewers from 3rd party is 400 - 1500+ depending on time of day. Many people who stream this game only do it because of that additional embedding traffic, some use it to launchpad into other games. So once that was gone, they started to campaign against my channel. One of them talked negativity about my channel on their stream, which lead to trolling in my chat from their viewbase.

At some point they contacted the 3rd party to complain about my channel. The 3rd party agreed with the complaints and censored my channel from being listed + promoted on their wiki.

I messaged the 3rd party myself to see exactly what the reason was for not being listed anymore.

Here was the responses:

• That channel was banned from our wiki after it was brought to our attention that they were exploiting the system, as documented in a blog.
  
  • So I guess they didnt like how I told people about how they are influencing/sending tons of traffic to certain games on twitch.... Is this suppose to be TOP SECRET? Who knows ...I replied and asked for more clarification.
• The 24/7 streaming is the issue. Once you've grabbed the unit, you don't give it up because you fill up reruns. The point of the embedded unit is to promote LIVE content, not reruns.
  
  • They made up a rule that no one knows about, its not listed anywhere, how is anyone suppose to know? I replied, since doing reRuns until the next time I stream was the issue, I said I can stop doing that and asked to be unbanned.
• You will not be unbanned. The embed is for promoting the games and platform, not for streamers to game for revenue.
  • This is a interesting reply, note the "Streamers to game for revenue". I didnt know streaming on twitch was a hobby, this person's mindset is very poor.

So they censored my channel, what happened then?



This person "HLAquarius" was monitoring the situation and ran to whisper me, but then for some odd reason they delete their username a couple days later? Hmm?


What makes this censorship stupid is how the Twitch API gives details if channels are in ReRun mode or Live, if the 3rd party doesn't want to promote or list a streamer in rerun mode, they can easily code it to not do that instead of censoring due to complaints from streamers.

And now I recently started to stream No Man's Sky again, and guess what happened? Another complaint and tada censored on another wiki from this Twitch owned 3rd party.

Let me finish up with some words of advice, if you are a streamer do not become depended on any 3rd party traffic or embedding, one day it may help get more exposure and the next day it maybe gone. Build your own content, wikis, do your own embedding and promotions - be in control!

What is launch padding for streamers?

What is launch padding and how are streamers doing it?

Launch padding is basically using specific games with high 3rd party embedding traffic to gain higher directory placement in new or more popular games.

What are some games that are good for launch padding?

As of 8/30/2018 the day of this post, the following games in my opinion have the best launch padding potential.

• Terraria
• Ark
• Minecraft

Some of the ways I have seen streamers exploit launch padding is by streaming game #2 and then when they finish broadcasting for the day, they then do reruns streams of game #1 (usually one of the games listed). Because viewership levels tend to drop during certain time zones and the amount of streamers also goes down, they are able to grab the top slot in game #1 directory and once that occurs the traffic from the embedding 3rd party boosts them. This is not always perfect but in general its works pretty well for some.

Or they stream game #1 until they grab the embedding traffic spike, then switch to game #2. A good example would be some people streaming Terraria, grabbing the embedding traffic and then switching to other games that have 'Twitch Drop' enabled like Warframe which further boosts numbers depending on directory placement.

If you have a big enough community, you can leverage this to possibly help with getting more exposure on the platform. But always keep in mind, 3rd party traffic is not something you control, it can end at any given moment.

Viewers in common analytics

Which channels have viewers in common with mine?

One of the newest pieces of analytics Twitch is offering to broadcasters is a top 5 viewers in common statistic. You can find this panel by opening up your dashboard, then going to the channel section under analytics on the left sidebar. There you should see a panel similar to this screenshot below, note I have censored the channels on this picture for a reason.





This section is extremely handy for determining possible co-streaming opportunities with other streamers on the platform. Try to reach out to channels in the list and see if you can work together in some fashion. Maybe even add these channels to auto host since the audience is similar.

Another interesting tidbit this panel is useful for is to determine streamers who are sending negativity your way via their viewer base. <--- Remember this line. If you find yourself wondering why so many chatters seem to have some agenda with what they are typing away, investigate this panel and see if these channels are talking about your channel.  In my situation, it easily pointed to a competitive mindset streamer who was indeed targeting my channel with negativity.

Huge amount of follower bots are copying your stream channel name

Huge numbers of fake follower accounts have been created using channel names.

So overnight some entity has created thousands of Twitch accounts using streamers channel's name. Here is a screenshot of what it looks for one of my channels on Twitch.

The format for the accounts appears to follow a pattern, its basically a streamers channel plus a random combination of one to three digits or letters. Some are also using pictures, avatars from established streamers in the profile.


Please be aware its not the channel owners doing it, if you get messages, alerts, /raids or whatever from channels that are following this format dont take it against the streamer.

Who exactly knows what the entity is planning on doing with all the fake accounts. Hopefully Twitch will investigate and remove these accounts from the system.

How to check if your channel was effected is by using the search function on the Twitch website.

Put in your stream name in the search bar and then click more on the channel section. Here is a screenshot to help you see where to click on to show more.

Again, be careful when clicking on things inside chat rooms, this entity maybe will try to post links with similar channel name to get viewers to click on them. It maybe a smart move to banned all accounts you find during search to prevent something like that from happening inside your chats.

Update - 8/19/2018

Checked to see if any of the new accounts have been removed for 'gamingwithdaopa' search and I still see a total of 30 or so fake accounts.  We are speculating the entity that is doing this account generation is trying to obtain 'free subs' from Twitch's new gifting option. I believe if they get a free sub, it may whitelist them inside that channel which will then allow them to post fishing links or other problematic links inside chat rooms.

It maybe time to prevent all URLs from being displayed in your chat unless its been reviewed by a moderator or channel owner. When reviewing links, pay attention to misspellings for domain names, and get a handle on URL shortener that will cloak links.

600,000+ Tune in for the start of Battle for Azeroth

At 6 PM Est time, the start of "World of Warcraft's - Battle for Azeroth" newest expansion launched and here are some screenshots of the numbers and top streamers on twitch!


Let start with overall viewers, it topped around 610,000 here is a screenshot from the Twitch directory.

Click to enlarge picture.

With any large AAA Title, tons of streamers who usually do not play or stream world of warcraft all jumped in for the expansion launch. Here is a look at the top most streamers:

Click to enlarge screenshot

Top  streamers for launch include the following:

• sodapoppin - 84,750 viewers
• Asmongold - 60,350 viewers
• LIRIK - 31,170 viewers
• ZeratoR - 29,728 viewers
• TimTheTatman - 26,652 viewers
• Reckful - 23,506 viewers
• shroud - 21,415 viewers
• AtheneLIVE - 16,513 viewers
• Towelliee - 14,535 viewers
• ungespielt - 7,612 vierwers

It is always amazing to see the viewership numbers for game launches like this Twitch. You can also view how much of a viewership hit some of these non wow streamers take by switching over to it for the launch window. As of 7:30 PM, overall viewership numbers have gone down to around 495,991 Viewers. I guess the core viewers are now busy playing the game and stopped watching streams.

Powerful Embedding Promotion

How embedding can be used to promote big events for your Twitch channel.

This past weekend Twitch had a major Overwatch League event and I noticed some of the various ways they used embedding advertising to promote the channel. For those of you who are not familiar with what embedding means its basically taking the channel video stream player and showing it externally outside of Twitch. A good example of embedding can be seen here on this blog, on the sidebar I embed my Twitch channel in the advertising section. You can also include chat as its own embed if you wanted to show that off.

So lets start with reddit, on numerous subreddits during the event they had a advertisement going which showed the stream as a embed. Here is a screenshot:


This would show up as a reddit promoted post and as users went to the subreddits that had this advert going, they would be able to watch the stream inside of reddit.

Next up and most likely one of the best embedding options Twitch has in their portfolio is gamepedia. Here is a screenshot of the OverwatchLeague channel being embedding across the majority of the gamepedia wiki network.


Even thou the event is over with that embed is still occurring which is extremely helpful when looking at how much channel views generation its generally doing. Lets take a quick look at some basic stats for this channel.


The event took place on the 27th and 28th of July, on the screenshot I've added 2 black dots. Now look at what happened on Sunday, over 2 million views on a offline stream. And continued on to Monday another 1.2 million views mostly generated by Twitch's embedding of the channel on gamepedia. How interesting to see a big bulk of the views coming from embedding promotions outside of Twitch.


One more place that I've seen in the past Twitch used to promote a special event was on imdb. IMDB is owned by Amazon, its a movie-actor type of a database lookup website. I forgot to check to see if they had any promotional embed for the Overwatchleague channel.  But here is how they used it during a Call of Duty Black Ops announcement event.



This was on the frontpage, top fold of the layout showing the channel as a embed.

Most likely they did additional promotion on facebook, twitter and other places but I didn't dig that deep. On facebook they do not allow 3rd party embedding, but on Twitter you can embed your stream.

Overall this shows how powerful embedding advertisement can be to promote your channel on Twitch. Check out my "How to get twitch viewers", guide for ways you can start taking advantage of embedding and other various tips that I have learned over the years of streaming.

Any questions or comments fill free to post below in the comment section.

Update 8/15/2018 - Noticed another embedded stream on r/twitch promoting Call of Duty, unlucky for them having a MATURE Filter enabled prevented the stream from autoplaying.

Here is a screenshot:

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Additional examples of embedding, date of screenshots taken on 4/27/2021.

Alienware Arena embedding

Gaming.Lenovo.com embedding

MSN Esports Hub embedding / aggrogator

Phishing scam streams

How to avoid getting caught in a phishing scam stream.

So no platform is safe from this type of a scam. A phishing scam is basically fraudulent attempts to obtain sensitive information like username, passwords and in the Twitch world of things it will include video game accounts and virtual goods.

I just recently hear of a Twitch viewer failing for a phishing scam. Here is what happened, they are fans of 'Old School Runescape' and noticed a streamer on Twitch with around 2,000 viewers playing that video game. This Twitch channel had a profile panel with information linking to a phishing website that looked exactly like the runescape forums.

So what happened was the viewer, checked out the Twitch's streamers profile, saw the link to what they thought was the official forums because the streamer wrote in the profile panel section they were quitting the game and giving away their items on the supposed linked forum thread. So the viewer thought oh cool, this streamer is giving away his stuff let me go check it out. So they clicked on the link that was in the profile, which was made to look exactly like the runescape forums. They put in their runescape account information and seconds later found themselves under a DDOS attack.  During that time frame their runescape gold, items were all stolen.

So here is what you need to always remember to prevent this exact sort of thing happening to you.

• Do not click on any random links in chat, whispers or profile sections for channels.
• Note even banners or streamer panels can have links pointing to external websites.
• Preview All URLS by mousing over, if they are short URLs do not trust them at all.
• If you trust the streamer and believe the links are ok, double check to make sure they are going to legitimate sites.  Sometimes hackers do extremely tiny changes to accounts such as changing out a link and just one link on a webpage leading to a phishing site.
• Remember a old saying, if its to good to be true, it probably is, if someone is offering something as a giveaway or promotion that wants username information, emails and other things make sure to verify the legitimacy before supply any personal information.

Majority of phishing scam that occur on the twitch platform are basically private messages text offerings with shortURL links that go to phishing webpages. This was the first time I heard of a stream being used as a way to phish.


Do you know of any phishing attempts happening on the Twitch platform? If so please share them in the comments section below.