Everything you need to know about Viewbotting on Twitch in 2023

Last Updated on 01/02/2023 by Dean

So you want to learn about view botting on Twitch?

Maybe you’re interested in running a viewbot yourself, or you want to know what exactly a viewbot is and why it’s so often talked about, or maybe you’re wondering whether or not view botting would be helpful for your stream…

Whatever the case may be, this is the article for you.

First things first…

What is Viewbotting? And why do Twitch streamers do it?

Viewbotting is the act of using software to increase your live view numbers on Twitch. They do this by either ‘renting’ a view botting service or by running a viewbot script themselves.

These viewers aren’t real viewers, they are nothing more than robots that are ‘watching’ your stream and bumping up the viewer count.

The reason viewbotting is so popular, is because it allows streamers to cheat their way to the top.

As you may know, Twitch has a chronological directory. Meaning the big guys like xQc and Ludwig will always appear on top, no matter the category, because they have tens of thousands of people watching their stream at all times.

New streamers however, are often stuck streaming to 0 or 1 viewer at all times.

In fact, if you filter a Twitch category and sort by ‘low to high’ instead of the original ‘high to low’ you will find hundreds and thousands of streamers who are streaming to less than 1 viewer.

Due to this extremely high competition on Twitch, many streamers have resorted to taking matters into their own hands and use a view bot to ‘boost’ their live viewers bumping them up in the directory.

For example, if I scroll down the Twitch directory for Valorant right now, I only have to scroll a little bit past the big streamers to find the streamers that are streaming to 100 viewers and less.

As a viewbotter, this is where you potentially could be, if you view-botted your numbers up until here.

Of course, you can go even higher and bump your numbers to 200 or even 500 live viewers.

But remember, the higher you go, the more likely you are to get caught.

Which brings me to my next point…

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How viewbotting works

A viewbot is simply a couple lines of code that opens Twitch in different browser windows.

You might think: I can do this myself! But it’s not that easy…

Since your PC runs from one IP Address, your viewer count would not increase because it would see every browser as the same viewer.

This is why view bots are designed to assign a different proxy to each individual browser it opens up. This proxy is basically an IP Address that is rented from a data center somewhere in the world and thus makes each opened browser appear to be a different viewer.

There are two ways you can go about viewbotting on Twitch:

• You can run your own view botting script
• Or you can rent a view botting service and have everything done for you

If you want to run your own view botting script you will need access to an external PC. If you don’t have a secondary PC you can use, you can rent a server instead. You’ll also need access to proxies and last but not least you’ll need access to a view botting script.

If all this sounds a little too technical for you, you can always opt for the second version: rent a view botting service.

Some view botting services offer weekly plans and monthly plans and some have single-use plans.

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How to viewbot for free

View botting on Twitch for free is next to impossible because you need high-quality proxies which Twitch won’t ban, in order for the viewers to show.

High-quality proxies are not cheap and definitely not free. Free proxies don’t work with viewer bots as Twitch will instantly flag them.

Even shared private proxies won’t work very well as Twitch runs scans every 2 minutes.

You can however, download a free viewbot for Twitch.

For example, there are some Twitch viewbot projects on GitHub, a quick google search will instantly reveal these for you.

Here’s what you’ll need to run your free Twitch viewbot:

• A secondary PC. If you don’t have a second pc, you’re going to need to rent a VPS (Virtual Private Server)
• A viewbot script, you can find these for free on GitHub.
• High-quality, non-shared proxies

A cheap private proxy will cost you about $1 per month. Meaning you would be spending at least $100 per month in order to get 100 viewers on Twitch.

At which point you might as well purchase a view botting service…

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The best viewbot for Twitch in 2021

So far I’ve reviewed 3 different viewbot services.

Out of the 3 view botting services I’ve tested, only 1 really worked: Viewerlabs. And it was nothing to write home about.

First of all, they have a trial. Which is completely free. It’s only for 30 minutes, but it’s a trial nonetheless. No credit card required, simply make a login and try out the viewbot, easy.

Viewerlabs has an affordable pricing plan, I say affordable only because it’s affordable compared to other view botting services.

Paying $90 per month for 100 live viewers, sounds like a huge waste of money to me.

They do have a single-use plan, which gives you 100 viewers + chatters for just $5. This sounds like a far better option for me.

It also kind of proves they are overcharging for their monthly plans. Think about it, how many times do you stream in a month? Unless you stream for 18+ days a week, you’re better off getting a single-use every time.

Purchasing a single-use plan for 15 days would cost you just $75. Streamers who only stream 10 days a month get away with $50.

I’m just saying, buying the monthly plan sounds dumb to me.

One feature I really liked, was that you can customize the live chatters.

This means you can go in and set up a ‘script’ of all the things you want the chatters to say, making them appear a lot more ‘real’.

Of course, the chatters would still seem robotic as there would be no engagement between them but it’s an improvement from the nightmare that unfolds when you unleash 100 chatbots onto a single stream.

Viewerlabs also has a clean dashboard, which allows you to set up exactly how many viewers you want at any given time, you can set up intervals between them, and so forth.

Viewerlabs also comes with 24/7 live chat support, which is important, when you purchase a service such as ‘buying live views for Twitch’.

They do underdeliver views though. You might use the single-use plan for 100 viewers and stream to 77 viewers, so expect that…

Overall, it’s a good service (for a view botting service) especially when compared to the other services out there. Viewerlabs is affordable, flexible, has customizable chatbots, live chat support, and a trial plan.

This is by far the best viewbot I could find for Twitch right now. The rest of the view bots that I found on Google were either a complete scam, overpriced, or had terrible support.

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Can you tell if someone is viewbotting?

Yes, you can tell if someone is view botting. Honestly, it gets pretty obvious as soon as you start streaming to over 25 viewers and no one is talking.

Especially if the streamer looks neither engaging nor interesting.

Or worse, if you start streaming to over 25 viewers and your chat starts looking like this:

• notabot56898: Hi
• notabot555078: How are you?
• notabot585484: Quality content!
• notabot21215: You are good!
• notabot6455489: Hi!
• notabot5723: Hello what’s up?

…you get my point.

These are ‘chatter bots’ which come with some viewbotting services and to say they don’t look legit, is a huge understatement.

Two years ago, a friend of mine started streaming on Twitch. Not because he wanted to become famous but because his girlfriend wanted to watch him while she was studying and he thought Twitch would be the best platform to do so.

So he had exactly 1 viewer: his girlfriend.

One day, while we were playing Dead by Daylight together, I told him about how viewerbots are taking over Twitch and he said: “what’s a viewer bot?” so I explained the process to him.

A couple of days later, while waiting in the lobby, that friend told me to visit his stream and look at his viewer count.

He was streaming to 23 viewers. Obviously, he was viewbotting. I decided to stick around and keep his stream open so I could read the chat afterwards to see if anyone would have talked to him and what did I see?

3 individual people came in and accused him of viewbotting.

It’s simply so obvious when someone who is not entertaining, has viewers.

Especially when they don’t have people talking to them in live chat.

Later, I asked my friend what his experience with view botting was and he told me it gained him nothing.

The worst experience he had was when he enabled the chat bots.

Here’s two ways I can see ‘view botting’ work out for someone without it being painstakingly obvious:

• Either they already stream to at least 100+ ‘real viewers’ and they want to bump up the numbers just a little bit
• Or a newer streamer enables just 1 – 5 live views per stream

So if you’re a newer streamer and want to get away from the 0-1 view count, using a viewbot can be useful.

Above that, it will probably do you more harm than good.

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Can viewbotting get you banned from Twitch?

As I made it abundantly clear earlier, Twitch has many reasons for hating viewbotters. Clearly, they don’t want these cheating individuals on their platform, and for breaking their ToS, they could definitely ban you.

This ban could even prevent you from ever streaming on Twitch again, especially if you’ve signed the affiliate agreement with Twitch.

But of course, Twitch won’t just go ahead and ban you if they detect a viewbot on your channel once… Anyone could have view botted your channel.

But let’s say you have inflated viewers for months on an end, Twitch might want to take action against you.

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Should you use a viewbot?

We do not recommend that you use a viewbot to inflate your live viewer count on Twitch. While this might look like a good way to get in more organic viewers, which is its only real benefit, it will likely do you more harm than good.

1. By view botting, you are risking a permanent ban on Twitch. This means you would never be able to become an affiliate or partner on the platform and make money from Twitch.
2. Not only that, but you are also risking your reputation. As I hopefully have sufficiently explained throughout this article, view botting is painstakingly obvious. You don’t want to be known as a viewbotter if you aim to make any type of career on Twitch.
3. You could get scammed. The large majority of these view botting services that charge a lot of money to increase your viewer count, don’t actually deliver. The reviews of each of these services are painfully bad. If you don’t have money to blow, don’t purchase a viewbot.
4. Viewbotting will make you lazy. Think about it, if you can achieve artificial views at the press of a button? Why would you ever bother not cheating? Why would you bother establishing a presence on social media and creating an audience for yourself when you have made everything SO easy on yourself?

The benefit of view botting is very minimal. You could get a bump in the directory, which will get you unique viewers, this is true, but in order to get a bump in most game categories, you would need at least 100 viewers.

Most view botting services will charge you a lot for 100 viewers and about 99% of them will underdeliver these views. Meaning you would need to subscribe to an even more expensive package in order to really get 100 viewers in your stream.

But again, this would make it so very obvious that you’re view botting. No one would be talking in your chat! And if they would, it would be very obvious they are bots and not humans.

This brings us to conclude that view botting doesn’t work.

Just think about your childhood days where you’d enter cheat codes on games like GTA… At first, you’re having a blast, but then the novelty dies off and you quickly find yourself getting bored of the game. That’s what view botting does to you. It makes you lazy, it makes you forget what it’s like to grind out there.