We’re living in a world where online influencers and social media dominate the advertising industry, and metrics like views and engagement hold significant power. They influence brand partnerships, content strategy, and ultimately, revenue. However, a deceptive practice known as viewbotting threatens the integrity of these metrics, impacting both creators and advertisers.

Understanding viewbotting is crucial for protecting your ad investments and ensuring data authenticity. In this article, ClickGUARD will explain this concept, how it affects marketing, and how you can protect yourself. Keep reading!

What is Viewbotting?

Viewbotting uses automated bots to artificially inflate the view count of videos or live streams. These bots mimic real users, repeatedly watching videos or streams to boost the content’s popularity, attracting genuine viewers and advertisers with fake views and engagement. 

Viewbotting is prevalent across various platforms, including YouTube, Twitch, and TikTok, each with its unique vulnerabilities to this practice. YouTube viewbots can inflate video view counts, making content appear more popular and engaging than it is. This can mislead advertisers and skew the platform’s recommendation algorithms. 

Twitch, a live-streaming platform primarily for gamers, is another hotspot for viewbotting, where streamers might use it to increase their viewer count, climbing the ranks of popular streams to attract real viewers and subscribers. TikTok, known for its short-form videos, is also affected by viewbotting, where users inflate their video views to appear more viral and gain followers quickly.

Types of View Bots

Viewbots come in various shapes and sizes, catering to the specific needs of those seeking to inflate their metrics.

• Automated Viewbots: Automated viewbots are programs or scripts specifically designed to simulate human viewing behavior automatically. These bots can operate continuously, generating fake views at a rapid rate without human intervention. They often use proxies to disguise their origin and avoid detection by platform algorithms.
• Manual Viewbots: A manual viewbot, on the other hand, requires some level of human intervention. Users may deploy these bots to manually interact with content, such as clicking repeatedly on videos or streams. While less sophisticated than automated bots, manual viewbots can still manipulate view counts and engagement metrics.

Why Do People Use Viewbotting?

While buying fake views or using a viewbot may seem unethical, several motivations drive content creators to resort to it. One of the most important is getting a quick popularity boost. By acquiring viewbots, creators can quickly inflate the number of views on their videos, creating the illusion of a large and engaged audience. This can open doors to new opportunities, such as brand partnerships and increased platform visibility.

It’s important to note that algorithms on platforms like YouTube and Twitch prioritize content with high engagement rates. By using viewbots, creators can manipulate these algorithms to boost their visibility, potentially reaching a wider audience and gaining organic growth.

While viewbotting may offer short-term benefits, the long-term consequences can be severe. Platforms regularly update their algorithms to detect and punish fraudulent activity, leading to account suspensions, loss of credibility, and damaged reputations.

The High Cost of Viewbotting

Despite the short-term benefits for a few, viewbotting takes a heavy toll on the entire industry.

Financial Impact

• Advertisers: The most direct victims of viewbotting are advertisers. Viewbotting leads to wasted advertising spend as artificially inflated metrics do not represent genuine audience engagement. Advertisers may unknowingly pay for ad placements that do not reach real viewers or potential customers.
• Platforms: Platforms such as YouTube, Twitch, and TikTok suffer reputational damage and potential revenue loss due to inflated metrics. Advertisers and users lose trust in platform metrics, affecting advertising revenue, user acquisition, and retention. The situation is so complex that even Twitch filed a lawsuit against several “botmakers” offering viewbotting services to users in 2018. 
• Legitimate Creators: Viewbotting creates an uneven playing field for genuine content creators. Legitimate creators find it challenging to compete with artificially boosted metrics, impacting their ability to attract genuine followers, monetize their content, and secure sponsorship opportunities.

Broader Consequences

• Difficulty in Identifying Quality Content: Viewbotting distorts metrics used to identify high-quality content. Algorithms that prioritize engagement metrics may wrongly promote artificially popular content over genuinely valuable material. It’s also bad for users in general: when the most popular content is not necessarily the best content, it can lead to a decline in overall content quality.
• Lost Trust in Engagement Metrics: When users realize that engagement metrics can be easily manipulated, they are less likely to trust these numbers. This can erode the credibility of influencer marketing and make it more difficult for legitimate creators to build authentic relationships with their audience.
• Unfair Competitive Environment: Viewbotting creates a dishonest and unfair competitive environment for creators. By allowing creators to artificially inflate their metrics, it rewards those who are willing to cheat.

How to Spot Viewbotting

Viewbotting can be difficult to detect, but some key indicators can raise red flags. Sudden spikes in view counts without good engagement rates is something to keep in mind. A genuine increase in popularity will likely be accompanied by a rise in other engagement metrics like comments, likes, and shares. 

Unusual patterns in audience demographics are another red flag. Viewbots can be programmed to mimic specific demographics, so if a video’s viewership comes from a geographically unexpected location or has a strangely uniform age range, it could be suspicious.

Don’t forget to keep an eye out for repetitive or generic comments. Look for comments like “Great video!”, “Amazing!” or comments that don’t really contribute to the conversation, especially if repeated many times. And the last sign is inconsistent watch time. Real viewers typically watch videos for varying lengths of time. If a video has a high view count but an unusually low average watch time, it could be a sign of bots dropping off after a few seconds.

Can You Block Viewbotting?

Unfortunately, completely blocking viewbotting is an ongoing battle. Bots are constantly being developed to bypass detection methods. However, platforms and creators can take steps to combat this deceptive practice.

Platforms:

• Advanced Detection Tools & Algorithms: Platforms invest heavily in sophisticated algorithms and machine learning to identify patterns indicative of bot activity.
• Human Moderation: Despite powerful algorithms, human reviewers can identify more nuanced forms of manipulation.
• Collaboration with Third Parties: Many platforms partner with specialized fraud detection companies to enhance their anti-bot capabilities.

Creators:

• Monitor Your Metrics Closely: Track your views, engagement, and audience demographics to identify any unusual patterns.
• Report Suspicious Activity: If you see a channel with suspicious activity, report it to the platform.
• Focus on Building Authentic Engagement: The best way to fight viewbots is to focus on building a genuine audience. Create high-quality content that resonates with your viewers, and encourage them to interact with your videos.

Viewbotting and Click Fraud: Understanding the Connection

While viewbotting focuses on inflating video viewership metrics, it shares some key similarities with another deceptive practice: click fraud, which involves generating fake clicks on online advertisements using automated programs or incentivizing users to click on ads without any genuine interest in the product or service being advertised. 

Although viewbotting doesn’t directly involve clicks, it can contribute to ad fraud. High view counts created by viewbots can mislead advertisers into believing a channel has a larger and more engaged audience than reality, making them spend more on ad placements on the channel.

In some cases, viewbotting services might also offer click fraud functionality. This allows users to inflate both views and clicks, creating a completely fabricated impression of audience engagement.

Legal and Ethical Implications

Both viewbotting and click fraud are considered unethical practices and can have legal consequences depending on the severity and intent. Terms of service for most online platforms explicitly prohibit viewbotting and click fraud. Engaging in these practices can lead to account suspension or termination. In some jurisdictions, click fraud can be considered a form of wire fraud or cybercrime, with potential legal repercussions.