China’s live-streamers use fake traffic and virtual gifts to draw real eyeballs
- The practice of paying for fake accounts to boost live stream viewer counts and virtual gift purchases is an ‘open secret’ in the industry, experts say
- Reasons range from pushing up live streams in recommendation rankings to earning fatter commissions from brands, but regulators are catching on
In 2018, when China’s live-streaming industry was growing at lightning speed, Huang Xiaobing felt her one-year career as an online live broadcaster had hit a bottleneck.
So she decided to start her own agency in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin focusing on entertainment live-streaming, managing online broadcasters who sang, danced or chatted with audiences in return for virtual gifts that could be converted to money, with the agency taking a cut.
In her new role, she helped the aspiring live-streamers gain popularity in the crowded online space. One of the common ways to achieve this was to buy virtual gifts for live-streamers under the guise of real viewers to boost their apparent popularity, tricking the platforms’ algorithms into pushing these broadcasts higher up on recommendation pages.
Everyone in the industry does this [buying fake traffic and virtual gifts] one way or another
“The agency would spend around 3,000 to 5,000 yuan (US$456 to US$760) to fill the chat room screen with virtual gifts,” said Huang, whose agency managed and trained up to 40 influencers at its peak before she left the industry last year to be a stay-at-home mother.
According to Huang, live streams may need to multiply their actual viewer counts by 10 to 50 times to get a spot on the main recommendation pages on platforms, where they have a higher chance of attracting the eyeballs and spending of real users. To maximise returns, Huang said her agency did not do this for every live-streaming session but instead selectively spent money on fake viewers and virtual gifts for the broadcasts it felt had the most potential to make big bucks.
“Everyone in the industry does this one way or another,” said Huang, who added that platforms themselves also sometimes artificially inflated numbers so it appeared that more people were watching.