How to Detect Fake eSports Influencers and Protect Your Ad Budget with Entyx

The Hidden Threat in eSports

Every third influencer in cybersports is fake. Imagine how much investments were generally wasted to be able to collaborate with their fake audience? Fake influencers can easily drain ad budgets by demonstrating inflated engagement and follower numbers. 

According to the report of HypeAuditor for the 2023, around 55% Instagram accounts have traces of unauthentic activities, including scrapped audiences and interactions. The situation in eSports is even more dramatic as the research shows that 30% of gaming influencers use bots to increase engagement. 

Entyx has useful solutions to detect such accounts to offer advertisers transparent and authentic AI-powered sponsorships in eSports. Let’s investigate fake influencers and eventual ad budget risks together in a new article!

The Problem: How Fake Influencers Drain Your Budget

According to Statista, the global influencer marketing market size has more than tripled since 2019. In 2024, the market reached a record of 24 billion U.S. dollars. However, the level of Instagram-influencer fraud has reached around 50% that means a significant presence of fake accounts and inflated activity. 

This means that nearly half of partnerships are also unauthentic and made up, which causes great ad budget risks for potential advertisers looking for collaborations with streamers. In cybersports and gaming overall, the topics of fraud and inauthentic influencers are as relevant as ever nowadays. Many advertisers face situations where gamers-influencers use bots for engagement manipulation that leads to ineffective marketing campaigns and wasted budgets of advertisers. Accurate statistics are quite limited in this sphere, but the process is ongoing  and requires increased attention from advertisers. 

Fake streams on Twitch might be obvious, but you have to imagine someone out there is falling for it, and someone makes big money. That is a huge issue on Twitch daily, especially in the Counter-Strike category, but yes, sometimes it flows to other streams as well, those being fake Twitch streams, which have been a thing time and time again. This has been going on for years, and especially over the past 12 months, we've noticed an increase in this, especially in the CS:GO2 scene. There are several top streamers and personalities, including pro players, like Shroud and Ninja, who don’t even stream on Twitch, yet have had fake streams on the platform, scamming viewers. Yes, oftentimes, they are actually viewbotted to get themselves to the top of that category or search listing. But especially when it comes to Shroud, Ninja, Stewie2K, s1mple, and tons of other figures in the eSports and gaming scene being faked on Twitch, and Twitch doing nothing about it. 

View buying on Twitch is a thing that's been around forever, and at various different times, people have been outraged about it, and it's kind of died down, but it's the process of, like, using bots effectively to boost your viewing numbers so you end up high in the, like, recommendation and browse sections. The bots can be fairly sophisticated in that they can type in chat, do messages and stuff, so it makes it seem like it's a real engagement from real people. 

Viewbotting on Twitch is surprisingly easy. When you would open up someone's game, it would open their stream in the background and would count as a viewer and run ads, earning thousands a month. Streamers embed bots into their gaming websites and that counts as a view on the website. Twitch has tried to crack down on that at various times, but it's a hard thing to do, and people have been complaining about that as well. There's some streamers who control gaming websites, and so they'll have their stream embedded like in the corner, like one pixel or something, muted, and so whenever anyone's on the website, it counts as one view, and that boosts them in the Twitch thing, but whatever.

What's the problem of viewbotting? Streamers are being exposed and displaced in recommendations with fake engagement. It’s just displacing the other people, like the genuine creators, or it’s removing legit creators from a position where they can gain their followers, especially for people who haven’t figured it out. Viewbotting is a horrible practice. When someone’s viewbotting, advertisers are reaching out for partnerships and expect them to be genuine, but they don’t understand that this is a scam and fraud at its core.

Red Flags: How to Spot a Fake eSports Influencer

Unusual Follower-to-Engagement Ratios. One of the biggest clues that someone might be a fake eSports influencer is their follower to engagement ratio. When you conduct your checks, take a look through an influencer’s streams to see whether the number of viewers matches up with their number of followers. If an influencer has a large audience but their followers rarely view streams, then it could suggest that many of their followers are bots or fake accounts. However, this method isn’t foolproof as some influencers might buy fake engagements or participate in engagement pods to falsely inflate their metrics. But still use it to check influencer fraud.

Analyze Influencer Engagement. Excessively high engagement rate or low-quality engagement can also be signs of a fake influencer account. Influencers can buy followers consistently engaging with their content. However, this engagement tends to be redundant and generic, such as emojis or the same one-word comments in chat on each one of their streams. Take a look at the number of followers and viewers of each stream. If this number is always the same, it’s possible that the same fake accounts have been paid to interact with each post.

Verify Audience Quality. The third factor is related to audience analysis, you have to check the audience quality. You can determine this by manually scrolling through an influencer’s followers list and viewing the profiles that jump out as suspicious. What do you look for? Keep an eye out for profiles with generic usernames or inactive accounts. Click on this profile and see the content that they’ve uploaded, see who they are following. If a profile is blank and has no followers of its own, except for this particular streamer, then it’s likely that it’s a bot or a fake profile.

The Solution: How Entyx Protects Your Ad Budget

Warning! Entyx is a powerful software for data collecting, visualizing, comparing and analysing from streaming platforms such as Twitch, YouTube, Kick that can become addictive once you start using it. 
Entyx AI analysis provides advertisers with a Channel Summary:
- Get a 360-degree overview of a streamer's channel performance, including the number of followers, total views, and average concurrent viewers.
- Check the historical data on channel growth and trends over time.
 

Advertisers also get a comprehensive overview on Streams and Games Data:
- Detailed analytics on individual streams, such as peak viewers, average view duration, and total watch time.
- Insights into the games played by streamers, including popular games, time spent on each game, and viewer engagement per game.
 

Authentic partnerships are secured for advertisers as they can check Subscribers and Viewers dashboards that include:
- Data on subscriber count, including new subscribers, recurring subscriptions, and trends in subscriber growth.
- Viewer demographics and behaviour analysis, including peak viewing times and viewer retention.
 

Chat Activity helps to identify suspicious patterns of audience’s behaviors: 
- Monitoring of chat activity during streams, including the volume of messages, active chat participants, and overall engagement.
- Analysis of the most used keywords and phrases in chat, helping to understand audience interests and reactions.
 

Entyx provides all necessary tools to support advertisers in choosing trustful influencers. We can analyse Keywords and do Sentiment Analysis right during the live stream! 
- Sentiment analysis of chat messages gauges audience mood and reactions in real time. 
 

But this tool can also be used by streamers. We help streamers tailor content and engagement strategies through the identification of trending topics, popular phrases, and keywords used by the community.
 

To demonstrate vividly how all of this mentioned above looks, please watch our YouTube video about Dashboard Entyx – AI Marketing Platform for Influencer Campaign Success and specifically about My Agency Feature.   

Let’s Sum It Up!

The Streamers you like may not be perfect in terms of numbers but at least they are not fake… Think about it when you choose your perfect match for collaboration. Influencer marketing is overcrowded with bots, wrapped metrics, fake subscribers and fraudulent schemes because everyone wants to become famous fast, with no investments nor efforts. And faking an engaged audience seems like an easy way to eat the winner’s cake. But every action has consequences. Fake influencers would lose trust forever and they basically steal from themselves any chance for success in the future. 

So we, AI-driven Marketing Platform Entyx, want to finish this article with the message for advertisers: please remember the importance of checking your streamers before launching campaigns with them. Our motivation to save your marketing budgets. Entyx provides advertisers with AI-driven tools to protect them from fake streamers and fraudulent partnerships. Let’s check the channels of your listed streamers? Sign up!