Twitch streamer and Novo.TV CMO Devin Nash has sounded the alarm on viewbotting, alleging that as many as 430 of the top 500 streamers are artificially inflating their viewership.
For years, viewbotting has been an extremely controversial topic in the livestream space. Basically, it’s the act of artificially raising a streamer’s total viewers through automated programs, giving the illusion that a creator is more popular than they actually are.
Kick co-founder Trainwreck has frequently warned about the severity of the viewbotting issue on Twitch, claiming that some streamers are paying as much as $20,000 a week for advanced bots.
He’s also alleged that 90% of Twitch’s top 100 streamers are botting, something that Devin Nash backed up in a scathing exposé.
Just days after Twitch revealed big changes to counter viewbots, Nash made a series of claims about just how bad the problem is on the Amazon-owned platform.
Devin Nash claims majority of Twitch’s top 500 streamers are viewbotting
Nash explained that he and his team analyzed the top 15,000 Twitch streams to detect viewbotting by monitoring chat activity and user lists every few minutes. They flagged repeated botted messages, cross-referenced usernames with known botnet databases, and looked at the ratio of logged-in to logged-out viewers to spot irregularities.
Their findings were stark: most of the top 500 streams showed signs of viewbotting. Around 30–40% of viewers were identified as obvious bots, with another 5–15% likely coming from embedded views.
Since I’m getting a lot of messages about our methodology, here’s a little of what we did to detect viewbots that I’m confident is difficult for the bot service providers to fight us on:
– We checked logged in/logged out user ratios on top streams and compared the % to streams…
— Devin (@DevinNash) July 31, 2025
“[We] were shocked at the number of top 500 broadcasters that are being viewbotted or viewbotting themselves. We estimate it is around 400 to 430 of the top 500, not including embed,” he said.
He further stated that viewbotting is incredibly simple. Up until two weeks ago, users simply needed to open a stream in an incognito tab to count as a viewer. Although this method has been fixed, the workaround is to use proxies.
“Twitch doesn’t punish anyone for view botting (unless a streamer shows it on screen) because, according to them, ‘we can’t know if it’s the streamer or someone else.’”
Infamously, a streamer went viral after she accidentally exposed her viewbot program during a live broadcast and was subsequently hit with a ban.
He also called out Twitch’s ‘Kingmaker’ system, where being at the top gives you all the visibility, so there is extra incentive, even for managers and agencies, to viewbot. Furthermore, viewbotting can trick sponsors into paying for viewership that doesn’t even exist.
In his own case, Nash noticed that when his marketing agency ran ads, the largest streams with over 30,000 viewers had the least sales, and 500-1000 viewer streams performed much better.
Nash warns the top viewbot offenders will be revealed
According to Nash, users should trust streamers Trainwreck and Asmongold on the subject, adding that they both know a lot more than they’re given credit for.
Trainwreck has remained critical of Twitch, even after their viewbotting update, stating that he suspects the most aggressive botters will be given false credibility because their bots are “expensive and advanced.”
Nash, however, believes the worst offenders are going to be exposed in due time.
“I suspect the most prominent viewbotting streamers will be revealed in the coming months, one way or another,” he warned. “It’s an open secret in the industry, and some broadcasters know where the bodies are buried. It’s only a matter of time before someone blabs.
“No one will miss these offenders, and they’re usually synonymous with pushing scam sponsors and exploiting their viewers in various ways.”
Interestingly, these claims come just days after Twitch CEO Dan Clancy expressed the opposite belief on a podcast. During the show, he stated that it wasn’t large creators botting, but rather “thousands” of smaller streamers.
Clancy, did, however, concede that he has “no idea” how many viewbots are on Twitch.
Content shared from www.dexerto.com.