Twitch’s live audience has sunk since the site went hard on viewbots – weekly viewer totals dropped between 4% and 23% after August 21. That matters because a surprising portion of the audience might not have been human, and the cleanup is changing who looks big on the site.
Plain talk: Twitch started cutting fake viewers, and the platform’s numbers reacted fast. Overall live viewership trended downward after August 21, with week-over-week swings that ranged from a slight dip to a complete 23% fall at the low point on Sunday, August 24. Wow.
There are still significant events that pull people in, but the steady decline outside of those spikes is apparent. Why this matters – viewbots are cheap, and anyone can buy them for another channel. Losing viewers after the purge doesn’t automatically mean a streamer paid for bots, but it does show how many platform viewers were probably not real people. Maybe that’s the idea.
For raw numbers, Twitch Tracker’s live viewer chart shows the gap clearly – the faded green line is last week, the bright one is this week. You can see the drop on their stats page: https://twitchtracker.com/statistics/viewers.
Some of Twitch’s biggest channels lost viewers along the same curve. Take Asmongold – his averages dipped roughly 10-30% on some days, with a clear downward trend except for the outlier on August 19 when he restreamed Gamescom’s Opening Night Live.
Smaller creators are affected too. Tectone mentioned his viewers swinging wildly as people kept sending bots to his channel, going from about 3k to 7k and back again. Who paid for those bots? Hard to prove, but the twitch of fake numbers is noticeable when the bots get yanked away.
This is early data – a few days won’t settle everything. But the takeaway is simple: when fake viewers are removed, the leaderboard and average numbers change fast. Kinda messy, but cleaner than the alternative.
