Kick boss responds to increasing viewbotting concerns: ‘we have nothing to gain’

Kick CEO Eddie Craven says the Stake-owned platform is committed to creating ways to combat issues with viewbotting on the platform.

Ever since the creation of Twitch, view botting has been a problem across streaming platforms. The process involves purchasing or creating a bot that artificially inflates views or follower counts on social media.

Kick streamer Big E managed to interview an active botter on his stream, who confirmed that the Stake-owned site is attempting to battle viewbotting.

Shortly after his post went live, Kick CEO Eddie Craven responded and revealed his thoughts about the issues with artificially inflating your streams.

“Kick genuinely has nothing to gain from view botting. Other platforms might see benefits from inflating viewer counts, but we’re committed to trying to keep a fair live-streaming environment for our community. It’s hard, and we’re not perfect, but we’ll keep doing our best,” he said.

“It’s worth noting that the vast majority of view botting updates/processes are not visible to users, or announced to the public, but we’re constantly rolling them out and trying to do better.”

Back in September, Kick revealed one of its most popular streamers, N3on, was viewbotting his way to the top of the platform and revealed his true viewer count of around 36,000.

They weren’t the first people to claim N3on was viewbotting, either, although the streamer has denied the accusations multiple times in the past.

Despite it happening on Kick, co-owner TrainwrecksTV says the problem is worse on Twitch because it is “less obvious.”

“You just see the Kick botting because there are less streamers,” he said.

On October 21, the US Federal Trade Commission enacted a new rule that bans “misuse of social media indicators” like follower and viewer count to misrepresent yourself – or make yourself look like you have more viewers than you do.