The History of Twitch.tv Botting

Introduction

The Twitch market was a once popular market - but has become increasingily regulated and harder for the botters. The market is both profitable and allows for the chance of a person to become viral on the Twitch platform.

Affiliate Accounts, TINs, etc.

The beginning of the Twitch fraud market are affiliate accounts. Affiliate accounts are accounts that Twitch has approved to pay money to and it must be earned, via streaming 7 days in a row, averaging 3 viewers, and obtaining 50 followers. These accounts also require tax information of the user, to hold the user liable for payouts. Fraudsters evidently aren't going to steal money from Twitch under their own name, so they need someone else's personal information and TIN (tax identification number). These affiliate accounts are sold for about 5 USD and are made fairly intuitively, the accounts are just botted and a generated TIN is put onto the account. A step-by-step guide was publicly published by a known Twitch botting community at this URL

Subs, Bits

On Twitch there are a few different types of subscriptions. There are tier 1 subs, which cost a viewer 5 USD and Twitch pays the creator out 2.5 USD. These tier 1 subs also scale to higher categories, such as Tier 2, Tier 3, which also just provide 50% of the revenue to the streamer. Twitch Prime subscriptions are 'free' subscriptions that a user can do to subscribe to one of their favorite streamers, free of charge, on the condition that they're Amazon Prime members. Many botting services create massive amounts of Amazon Prime accounts on a 1-month free trial, where they will then automatically subscribe them to a channel for the month at they are on the trial. Other services crack massive amounts of Twitch accounts and then donate bits from the account to the streamer. Additionally, there are 'farmed' bits, which is a mechanism Twitch has to incentivize users to watch streams for long periods of times. Twitch basically offers bits, which can be redeemed for on-site emojis on a streamer's channel, which exchange to USD for a streamer. People will farm bits utilizing bots and then donate the bits to a streamer, which the streamer can then cashout to USD at a rate of about 10 USD per 1,000 bits.

Viewbots, Chatbots, etc.

There is software in blackhat markets that are able to provide views, chatters, and more to make a streamer look more popular than they really are. They do this by inflating the streamer's viewers and chatters to make the streamer appear more favorable in Twitch's algorithm for promotion, they essentially show up more often when people look for streamers. Additionally, these viewbots and chatbots can be used to meet requirements for Twitch's partner and affiliate program. Additionally, these bots are used to legitimize Twitch accounts that are being used for fraudulent profitable uses like bits & subscribers that are obtained illegitimately.

The software can range from 79 to 130 USD for a typical bot and comes with other tools additionally. Twitch tools tend to take an "AIO" (all-in-one) approach, where they package many malicious Twitch softwares into just one singular software at a flat price. They require little upfront cost, just the cost of the software, Twitch accounts (tokens), and residential rotating proxies. Out of all of these, the residential rotating proxies are the most expensive asset, which when geotargeted can cost a fair bit of money. The tokens are hard to obtain as well, but they are relatively cheap and are sold in the thousands. Some tools include a token generator, but this is rare and most of the token generators in the market aren't working. The tokens are needed for the viewerlist on Twitch, which is just a list of people who are watching your stream, and for the chatbot, as to chat you must be signed in.

I've seen viewbots range up to the thousands of views with the right proxies and tokens, but I haven't found many instances above the 4-digit range for purposes of botting, nor would it be practical for profitable purposes.

Twitch Ads

Twitch ads are essential to the income of the operation of someone who is botting Twitch. Typically, viewbots and chatbots are just there to supplement the statistics of a Twitch account to legitimize the ad revenue on a given account. The adbots in the market are fairly simple, they typically just run 100s of browser automation instance such as BAS with a residential proxy (to make the request seem legitimate, as Twitch doesn't typically show ads to non-residential IPs), until the streamer stops streaming. If done correctly, the streamer can make a fair bit of money compared to their investments into proxies and software, but there is a big risk in this model. Twitch has good detection for viewbots and adbots, thereby if they detect adbotting they may suspend the fraudster's Twitch account and withhold any payments they may receive. There are guides tailored towards being undetected by Twitch - but there is a lot of luck in the formula for the botters. The link to the guide can be found here. The guide suggest the user gradually scales the amount of revenue they receive from ads to appear legitimate in Twitches eyes, along with amplifying viewer and chatter numbers using the aforementioned AIO software.

TwitchAlps

A unique concept I found while researching this rather straightforward market was TwitchAlps, a service that does somewhat legitimate viewing services. In an interview with the owner of this service, I discovered that this service doesn't use residential rotating proxies to watch hundreds of instances of the stream, but infact has real viewers via embedding streams in partner websites. This results in real viewers that also can get ads, which generate revenue for the streamer. On the other hand, TwitchAlp does cost more than the average service as this service is said to not be in violation of Twitch terms of service, as the viewers are legitimate.

Conclusion

The Twitch market can be used to generate extra money for streamers and help a streamer rise in the ranks of Twitch by amplifying a streamer's statistics, making them more likely to be infront of real viewers. This market has been around for years despite receiving constant pushback from Twitch.