Twitch streamer Ludwig Ahgren went live on his Twitch channel after returning from Sh**camp 2021 to catch up with his community. While discussing New World, he mentioned that the Fextralife community channel view count and embedded streams on their site are suspicious.
Fextralife is a gaming community and news site focused on Action, Adventure, and RPGs, with over 860,000 Twitch followers. Along with the broadcast channel, the community provides hundreds of game wikis devoted to the same genre of game to assist players in figuring out what they need to know in order to succeed or simply learn about.
After discussing Twitch’s newest stream-boost feature and how it “helps the rich become richer,” Ludwig shifted the conversation to larger streamers withholding viewers. As a result, he saw something about the stream from Fextralife that he thought was odd.
Ludwig noticed after checking out Fextralife’s stream that they had been live for over 24 hours and had nearly 60k viewers, but not many of them were really interacting. He used the /chatters command on the communities channel to disclose that they have little over half of their view count active in chat while discussing this to his chat.
Ludwig returned to his channel and repeated the instruction, demonstrating that despite having half the viewers, his engagement was significantly higher. Ludwig continues to explain why Fextralife has so many viewers, alleging that they are “stealing views” by embedding broadcasts on their game wikis.
It’s unclear whether or not this is correct.
He demonstrates that the appropriate wiki is the second result on a Google search for “dark souls guide.” An embed of their channel may be seen in the top left corner of every page of the community’s wiki.
Ludwig stated; “I don’t know if it’s illegal and I don’t know if it’s against TOS, but it’s not a good thing for Twitch. I’m just saying it’s eating up every New World viewer because they’re going to Fextralife instead of smaller streamers who provide pretty entertaining content.”
Although Twitch has a section on their help page dedicated to fake interaction, it’s unclear whether any of those restrictions would apply in this particular case.
