Twitch just posted its worst viewership numbers in five years. The platform’s monthly statistics showed sharp drops in both average concurrent viewers and total hours watched, according to third-party analytics from Streams Charts.
The timing tells the real story. These record lows happened right as Twitch deployed new anti-bot measures across the platform. Between the seventh and 15th of the month, viewer counts on multiple channels suddenly plummeted. Not gradually. Not naturally. Just instant drops that screamed “fake viewers removed.”
The numbers paint a brutal picture. Channels that seemed healthy one day lost thousands of viewers overnight. Some streamers watched their average viewership get cut in half. These weren’t organic viewer departures. This was Twitch finally cleaning house on viewbots that had been inflating numbers for who knows how long.
Third-party trackers like Streams Charts and SullyGnome don’t control these numbers. They just report what they see from Twitch’s public data. When they all show the same synchronized drops across multiple channels, it means something systemic happened. In this case, that something was a bot purge.
But bots aren’t Twitch’s only problem. The platform has been bleeding viewers to YouTube and Kick for months. The ad situation has gotten out of control. Click on a stream and you might sit through three minutes of ads before seeing any content. Mid-stream, you’ll get hit with eight unskippable ads at the worst possible moments.
Streamers can disable pre-roll ads by running three minutes of mid-rolls per hour. But many don’t know this or forget to manage it properly. Meanwhile, YouTube offers rewind on live streams, higher quality options, and YouTube Premium covers all ads site-wide. Twitch Turbo costs $11.99 monthly just to skip ads on one platform.
The competition has noticed Twitch’s weakness. Kick positioned itself as the low-ad alternative. YouTube keeps adding features Twitch lacks. Even Twitch’s own rule changes, like allowing multistreaming in late 2023, made it easier for viewers to jump ship when ads hit.
This isn’t Twitch’s first bot battle. They sued bot sellers back in 2016. They’ve done purges before. But this one hit different because it happened when the platform was already struggling. Remove the fake engagement padding and suddenly the real numbers look scary.
The viewership tracker methodology is straightforward. Services aggregate public viewer counts, calculate averages, and track hours watched. When Twitch removes bots, these trackers immediately reflect the lower numbers. The five-year low isn’t just about fewer humans watching. It’s about finally seeing the real numbers without artificial inflation.
What makes this worse for Twitch is the timing. Post-pandemic viewing has already normalized to lower levels. Short-form content on TikTok and YouTube Shorts pulls attention away from long live streams. Now add a bot purge revealing how much of the platform’s metrics were fake, and you get a five-year low that looks really bad on paper.
