Get Users API endpoint – “view_count” deprecation

As of today, messaging has been added to the Twitch Stream Manager indicating that the “views” count along the top of the page will be removed on April 14, 2022. For further information regarding how this change affects broadcasters, please see the Stream Stats section of the Stream Manager Twitch Help Article.

Why is this change taking place?

“views” counts the number of times a channel page is loaded on a desktop browser and is not inclusive of the mobile experience or related to watching video content. Since this metric does not tell an accurate story of viewership and can be misleading, this service is being deprecated. We want to make sure the stats creators see accurately reflect their live audience and engaged community – this statistic does not meet this standard. We recognize that some creators may be disappointed to see this statistic go because it’s a number that always goes up and it’s used to celebrate “lifetime” milestones. This is not lost on our product team and they’re currently discussing how we could support lifetime metrics in the future.

What’s changing for developers?

Removal of the underlying service that calculates “views” has an impact on the “Get Users” endpoint as this value is delivered as “view_count” in the response.

Beginning April 15, 2022, the data in “view_count” will not be updated and will contain stale data.

At a later time, we will remove the “view_count” field from the Get Users response payload entirely. This announcement will be updated when a date is selected to remove the field, which will take into account a timeline of several weeks to minimize the impact on third-party applications.

Who will be impacted by these changes?

All developers who use the “Get Users” API endpoint and utilize the “view_count” value in their application.

Developers who are displaying this data or use it for other purposes such as sorting, should update their application to no longer rely on this data as it will not be updated and eventually removed.

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I understand that the metric is misleading and the reasons why you are getting rid of it. We use it in our app as a general indication how the streamer’s channel is growing regarding his viewership. Imagine it as something like his overall views on his YouTube channel (sum for all of his videos).

Is there something we could substitute it with right now? For example it would be great to have at least total view count for all of streamer’s VODs (but now we would have to go through the pagination to sum it).
Although not everyone is using those. Some general indication of the impressions of the channel would be awesome.

Thank you for providing this context and your questions. This deprecation has led to discussions regarding if and how we could support lifetime metrics via the API to replace views with a more meaningful statistic, however these are not available today. This could take the form of an addition to Get Users or perhaps a dedicated channel analytics endpoint as this UserVoice entry suggests. We understand that creators can benefit from multiple use cases provided by third-party developers with this information and will follow up with any features that are added regarding creator analytics.

In the meantime, to your point, other endpoints such as “Get Videos” to sum video views or “Get Broadcaster Subscriptions” with the channel:read:subscriptions scope, might be an alternative to measure creator impressions currently.

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