How to Remove Viewers Bots From Your YouTube Live Stream

Whether or not you want to get lots of views is up to you. Depending on the type of business you have, thousands of viewers may not be necessary.

View bots are not only bad for organic growth, but can also be harmful to advertisers. In this article, we will cover how to detect and remove view bots from your live stream.
What is a Viewer Bot?

A viewer bot is a software program that automatically watches a streaming video or listens to a podcast. It can then either click on advertisements or send requests to the streamer for songs. View bots are a massive problem for the streaming community and for advertisers. When ads are clicked on by fake viewers it is called ad fraud and costs brands a fortune.

Using view bots is against the terms of service for all major streaming platforms. However, this does not stop many new creators from employing them to inflate their views.

There are a number of ways to spot if someone is using view bots. One of the easiest is to look at the number of views and compare it to the number of chatters. If a streamer has thousands of views but only a few people in chat this is usually a sign of view bots being used. The other way to check is by looking at the comment feed, most view bots will post generic and repetitive comments.
How do Viewer Bots Work?

Viewer bots, also known as viewbotting, are malicious bots designed to help inflate video metrics like views and live stream viewer counts. They are most commonly used by video and live stream creators to catapult themselves onto streaming platforms’ kingmaker algorithms, boosting their audience numbers and enticing platforms to promote them.

The most straightforward viewbots are simple scripts that open a video in a headless browser, but more sophisticated services offer more customization and functionality such as the ability to change the number of viewers instantly, set viewer join and leave intervals, and select the geographical origin of the “viewers”. View bots can also be integrated with chatbot capabilities that spam the chat or comment sections of videos with artificial banter to further inflate engagement metrics.

Viewer bots aren’t just against the terms of service for most video platforms but are also a huge contributor to the global fake traffic problem estimated to cost advertisers $100 billion by 2023. Repeated offenses can result in YouTube taking your videos down and/or blocking your monetization eligibility.
How to Detect Viewer Bots in a Live Stream

View bots are a big problem for streamers. Not only do they distort viewership numbers, but they also skew advertising data and cause marketers to spend money on fake impressions. This leads to wasted budget, missed opportunities with genuine customers, and lower overall sales for the brand.

There are a few ways to spot viewers that are likely view bots. Firstly, if a channel’s viewership is rising dramatically it could be an indication of view botting. Secondly, if a channel has a large number of followers but few engagements or subscriber numbers it can be a sign that the followers are mostly view bots.

Finally, if the channels chat is full of meaningless or repetitive comments it may be a sign that the viewers are view bots. There are a lot of websites out there that can help you check for view bots but be wary as many of these sites will require you to download programs onto your computer which could be harmful.
How to Remove Viewer Bots

There are a few ways to remove viewer bots from your live stream. One way is to use a tool that detects and blocks these users. Another way is to manually block the user accounts and videos that are associated with them. Another way is to use hidden blocking to prevent these bots from accessing your channel. This works by using an algorithm to determine whether a user is a bot. It looks at a few different factors, such as the date that they registered and the amount of information that is available about them.

If you are using a tool like StreamYard, you can also set up session restrictions to limit how many songs a person can request during your broadcast. This helps to keep your song request queue from being completely full. However, this method can be abused by users who want to advertise their own music or a service. To avoid this, you can add a blacklist of keywords that are not allowed in the chat.youtube live stream viewers bot