In the middle of a true boom of channels of streaming In our country, with an increasingly powerful offer, competition between them exceeded the discussion for the figures and the contents to focus on The veracity of your audience numbers, With complaints crossed by The use of bots by Slack y Olga, But it has also appeared on occasion Bondi. How much is true in the accusations and what are the obstacles to achieve reliable measurement?
“Streaming metrics are totally manipulable. I am very clear how metrics work and that is why I don’t care what numbers give the platforms, ”Mario Pergolini said a few weeks ago in a conversation with María O’Donnell. The former CQC He is truly a pioneer in the radio transition towards his live audiovisual version on the Internet, but he has long been disenchanted with how the ecosystem is being developed.
In his vision, it’s not just about Slack but of several competitors “who put anabolic when they can” when counting how many viewers they have. Sports metaphor refers to “The Bots”, an automated software which mimics the behavior of a real spectator to artificially inflate audience statistics.
Today it is possible not only the automation of visits with applications, but also the interactions such as putting “like” or creating generic comments. The mechanisms to achieve this are varied: from the use of proxies and rotating IP addresses to sophisticated algorithms that try to imitate human behavior over time, making it difficult to distinguish between a genuine and an automated session.
In the case of Pergolini, the numbers that can be seen in live broadcasts of YouTube They are not “clean”: “The method is to artificially generate many requests -Paids to see the transmission-, which tell as people watching the video. But there is no one there. When you see the analytics numbers two days later, that number changed. ”
But that number is not public, as Mirados Granados mentioned, the mandamás of Olga, In an answer to an X user, since only the owner of the channel of YouTube.
If compared to the rating measurement made by the consultant Kantar Ibope, where a rating point equals around 58,000 homes in relation to the population of the city of Buenos Aires and Greater Buenos Aires, the public numbers it offers YouTube They refer to connected devices. That is, perhaps from an intelligent television there are 2 or more people watching that content. But once that live content ends, it is often edited in much shorter and more vertical versions for YouTube shorts, Tiktok e Instagramcreating new audiences.
“The number one sees in the live broadcast on YouTube cannot be compared to the rating minute by minute,” said Pergolini, who believes that what matters is the content on demand More than live broadcast, since it is where advertisements are consumed.
But being able to achieve a audience number in this fragmented scenario is very difficult, even without counting the variable of the bots. In Argentina there are two X, Radio Streaming and live Stream accounts, which are two startup that for a while since they have been sharing data that they carry out with their own formulas and many of the streaming world pay attention to their figures. Although the one that started the last controversy for the streaming numbers, was the real account Time, which put the suspicion around the visualizations on the table.
-These numbers aroused a new confrontation between Granados and Occhiato, but this time the leader of Luzu TV He defended himself ensuring that in reality The bots are sent to harm him: “We do not need to do this because we have a real community. Clearly, they are wanting to get dirty.”
On the other hand, Flavio Azzaro, who launched his own medium called Azz, He celebrated in his X account the Ranking of live Stream, which placed last March over other Fuste names.
“I’m fed up! If this does not change I will talk about who buys the bots And how they do it because if they are not going to destroy the platform. If Mario Pergolini looks at him 18,000 people, how can it be that others have 60,000 connected? ”He denounced.
One of those who lifted the glove of Azzaro’s complaint was Tomás Rebord, The central figure of Blender, who joined the crusade “Against the Clones”, without giving more details of who are the means that use these little ethical resources.
By history, subscriber volume and impact on their contents, The two snacks of the streaming scene today are Luzu TV y Olga, With the venture created by Nicolás Occhiato taking the lead above Migue Granados. While in the beginning one could imagine that they appeal to different audiences, the truth is that the pass of figures between them (not exempt from controversy, as in the case of Nati Jota, Grego Rossello, Nacho Elizalde) suggests that there are shared jealousy and rivalry.
But on the podium they also want to join more political and current dye channels as Blender, Neura y Jelly; youngest proposals such as The housewhere Tini Stoessel announced his new show Futtura; The Vorterix pioneer, a medium designed by Pergolini years before the current boom existed and today has the influencer Luquita Rodríguez in the supervision of content, and Bondi, Created by the TV producer Tangerine which has Ángel de Brito and Esteban Trebucq as visible faces.
Beyond the explosives of the accusations, in the face of uncertainty and questioning about the veracity of the figures, The need to create an independent and reliable source arises to measure the rating in the streaming environment. It is not an impossible company, but it would require the agreement of all parties, with the coming of platforms such as YouTube o Twitch, Service suppliers, control agencies and the academic community, to establish standardized metrics and objective criteria that hinder figures manipulation.
There is no doubt that the evolution of streaming in Argentina is a reflection of the media transformation in the digital age. On the one hand, streaming channels show the creative capacity and innovation that exists in our country, but, on the other, they also highlight Ethical and technical challenges that require collaborative solutions to ensure transparency and reliability in the measurement of the real impact of the contents. Achiable and agreed to measure the audience is imposed as a need to show the maturity of this new information and entertainment ecosystem.
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