4realfan

This is not a conspiracy. The other night I ran an experiment in my Twitch chat to test the theory of “lurkers not counting as viewers.” I was live for exactly 2 hours, my viewer count was consistently 74-78 people during that time. I proceeded to ask everyone watching to use a new channel point command I made or just type literally anything in chat to see what would happen, all at once. Keep in mind another thing, I never ever run ANY mid roll ads, unlike the example this guy uses in this video, so there’s NO fluctuation from that on my end. I wish I was recording my viewcount as evidence, but my chat being there to witness it live themselves was proof enough. Would you believe, within the span of about 60 seconds, my viewer count skyrocketed from ~75 to 105-115? That’s not normal. It also remained that way for the next 4 hours of my stream. How do you explain that? Was it the “seasonality” of everyone just so happening to join my stream at that exact moment? Or does it have something to do with viewer activity in my chat? Keep in mind I attract a ton of lurkers, I have an “ASMR” type voice if you will so many people honestly use my streams for background noise or to help them sleep. Everyone watching live was in shock, as was I, at the massive change in viewership due to my chat request. This new viewcount is also more in line with what my typical viewcount has been for YEARS before it magically dropped by ~30% every night when Twitch started playing around with their secret backend. Mikey here feels pretty standoff-ish in this clip and doesn’t like the fact that streamers are noticing and continually calling out that something isn’t right that’s impacting streamers with real viewers. I’ve worked so hard over the past 10+ years to build a community that tunes into my streams on a nightly basis. Believe me, myself and many other streamers KNOW when something isnt quite right. This isn’t just “seasonality” of people choosing to not watch streams, I’ve never seen my numbers dip like this in over a decade (I started streaming in 2009 and only saw growth since, I never suddenly went backwards because of some “seasonality” explanation.) You can say “don’t worry about view count, just keep enjoying what you’re doing,” or something to that effect, but streamers that fall under a certain bracket of viewership that attempt to stream full-time are heavily impacted by things like sponsored opportunities, keys for newer releases, etc, by how many average live viewers we have on average. The difference between being above or below 100 on average is huge in many cases. I’m already feeling the impact of this. Without those opportunities it’s much harder to stream for a living. Sponsorships are a huge part of the ecosystem of a streamer with 100-150 average viewers, like it or not. Anyway, I just had to throw my hat into the ring because this guy only uses one example and says “oh it’s because she ran an ad and the viewers went up after!” Well guess that I don’t run ads, now explain that one.

Move over PS5 and Xbox, the Atari VCS is here. Checking out this odd console and what it has to offer twitch.tv/petedorr