I feel like that’s the kinda thing that should be like a penalty in Football: you always have the chance to decline it. Otherwise that’s just fucking rewarding cheating.
When people who think eSports could apply to anything…
Turned on Twitch and I saw someone at esports_bar giving this panel. I took a clip of the most fascinating tidbit.
As I’ve been saying, eSports is HUGE. The true sizes and popularity of everything in our culture is skewed because the billionaires that own the big media companies use those media companies to promote the other things they own, like, and believe in. Things like anime, eSports, KPop, etc. are insanely popular, perhaps among the most popular things on the planet. They only appear small because the push by the biggest media companies is not proportional to the actual audience size.
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Same with Netflix. From their earning’s call in January:
In a quarterly letter to investors Thursday, executives played down increasing competition from well-heeled companies like The Walt Disney Co. DIS, +0.51% and Amazon.com Inc. AMZN, +0.80% . Instead, it sees itself competing against every service that demands screen time, proclaiming that “We compete with (and lose to) ‘Fortnite’ more than HBO.”
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If advertising pays for advertising that makes advertising pay…
…someone’s getting screwed.
The people getting screwed are the people paying too much for cable/satellite TV and the companies buying ads on TV. We’re already seeing people cut the cord. Other than cars, car insurance, and beverages what ads are there propping up television? Ads for old people. When old people who watch TV are dead and the old people are like us, who Internet, then the old media of TV and radio will tip over.
Who is reporting these numbers? Who has incentive to make them as high as possible?
Click fraud is a thing. Is view fraud a thing?
Good question. Nielsen ratings are equally fraudulent, though, so I figure it cancels out.
Definitely a thing.
Twitch viewbotting is actually quite fascinating and new compared to other forms of digital traffic fraud because it has a much wider variety of motivations and interested parties.
Back in the day click fraud was pretty simple. You have ads on your site. You create fraudulent traffic to get more ads. You have an affiliate deal. You create fraudulent transactions to rake in cash.
Twitch’s big mistake is that they have a front page that highlights the streams that already have the most viewers. So now a Twitch streamer has incentive to viewbot themselves to get on the front page to turn that fake traffic into real traffic.
Also, real companies pay streamers to play certain games. Even if that streamer is honest, the company will often, without even telling the streamer they are doing it, viewbot the streamer to help promote their game.
Also, viewbotting is against the rules and can get a streamer in trouble. I’ve heard stories of streamers using viewbotting as a method of harassment to get other streamers in trouble, since there’s not necessarily a way to prove who is doing the viewbotting.
The classic case still applies. You viewbot and you show an ad on your Twitch channel that a bunch of bots will watch. That advertiser now pays for that ad to be seen by all those bots, and the streamer gets more cash.
Twitch has taken quit a bit of action to fight viewbotting, but it’s still a thing. I think the best thing they could do is restructure their site to not give prominence based on views.
The streams on the homepage should be curated by hand. Hell, just let people pay money directly to twitch to have their stream be put onto the homepage in a bidding war. At least then the money doesn’t go to viewbotting companies, the process is transparent, and viewcounts are more accurate.
What’s the difference between a viewbot, person with a real account who has malware that causes it to tune in secretly to streams, and a person who just leaves twitch streaming all day every day on their PC?
A viewbot is software that will create a LOT of views. Twitch thinks people are watching, but nobody is there.
A malware on a real account is going to harm that person who is infected with the malware. Their accounts will get all messed up thinking they watch streams they don’t watch. Also, it only creates one view. I don’t think it is very widespread.
If someone leaves twitch on all day, that’s legit. At least for the purposes of reporting numbers to advertisers, it is comparable to television. The video is being displayed on a screen somewhere that might catch someone’s eye, and that counts. Audio could be muted.
One adjacent thing I’ve always wondered is the level of granularity twitch and youtube and whoever has over their streams. How much can they really tell?
Can they tell if I have the stream on my main or secondary monitor? In the active tab or a background tab?
Volume muted via the twitch client, windows, or my headset’s volume wheel?
How much do they know about exactly how I watch their stream?
I can guess on some of these but I wonder on others.
You have to assume they know everything it is possible for them to know that you haven’t blocked them from knowing. Assuming you are using a web browser, it comes down to what data the web browser provides to web sites. So for your examples:
Main or secondary monitor no, but they do know the size of the browser window. That gives them information via inference. They also know active or background tab. They know volume in the client, but not system volume or headphone volume.
They can track any and all user interaction with the web page itself. They can draw a line of where the mouse moved and clicked and every button your pressed on that page or any of their pages.
To stop them from knowing you have to block the Javascript that is tracking this info.
Well I use uBlock, privacy badger and sslEverywhere also open refferer control.
The only one that may do this is privacy badger.
It’s unclear if I’m explicitly blocking it.
Also, I take a bit of issue with this line. It’s theoretically possible for them to know literally everything about my computer. Nothing in physics prevents them from knowing which monitor they’re on.
The browser could ask the system for that information. There’s no law of the universe preventing them for playing nice on that. Even for my analogue headset somebody could write software to determine where the volume slider is at on it.
It’s POSSIBLE for them to know the status of every CPU register and memory address every millisecond.
As implausible as that may be. I’m reminded of your blog post saying you’re not impressed by modern hackers.
Ok but more seriously for a moment, primary or secondary monitor. I could see Twitch and Microsoft working out a deal for that info.
That’s not how web browsers work.
It may be possible if you use the actual Twitch App.