Sit in any sizable streamer’s Twitch chat for long enough, and the topic of numbers is bound to come up. Why isn’t viewership what it used to be? Why has the streamer plateaued? Why aren’t they as big as [insert bigger streamer here]? After a while, it starts to wear on some streamers. Cory “King…
Let’s say you’re an up-and-coming streamer. You’ve done it for a while and you make decent money, although you’re no Tyler “Ninja” Blevins. But you’re on your way there, or so you hope. A while back, you got the opportunity to sign with an agency that promised to help you set up deals to advertise…
Australia is on fire. Thousands of homes have been destroyed, countless people have been displaced, and 24 people have died. More than 15.6 million acres of land have burned. All this, and Australian summer is only just beginning. With the government failing to act against the blisteringly obvious effects of climate change, some streamers are…
If you search any popular Twitch streamer’s name on YouTube, you’ll find countless videos scraped from their streams. Of these, some will likely come from the streamer, but many are the product of users who upload content that is not, strictly speaking, theirs. Recent YouTube changes, however, are apparently making that more difficult. Instead of…
Anybody can make an account on Twitch. It’s a quick, simple process that takes only a few minutes. You (a super villain, in this hypothetical scenario) might be wondering what’s to stop somebody from naming an account after a popular streamer and, say, scamming a bunch of people. Not much, it turns out. Over the…
Everyone could benefit from therapy, especially streamers. While popular streamer Byron “Reckful” Bernstein’s on-stream conversation with Dr. Alok Kanojia was not an officially designated counseling session, it resembled one at times. Bernstein is a former top World of Warcraft player and current streamer who’s now working on his own online game, Everland. Over the years,…
Saqib “Lirik” Zahid, who has 2.5 million followers on Twitch, is the last streamer to need a viewbot. Nevertheless, over the last couple of days, his fans and followers wondered whether he’d somehow succumbed—this week, his average 27,000 viewer count for November shot up to a huge 76,000 for no discernable reason. Zahid felt the…
You win some, you lose some. Some days you eat the bear, some days the bear eats you. Long have these sorts of aphorisms existed in the cultural lexicon. Now, thanks to popular streamer Jeremy “DisguisedToast” Wang, we’ve got a new one: Sometimes you catch the shiny Pokémon as part of two streams that last…
Before the tail end of August, Daniel “Jokerd” Gobey was basically a nobody. Then he won the worldwide race to hit level 60 in WoW Classic and became an overnight Twitch sensation, with over 300,000 people tuning in to watch his big moment just three days after Classic’s launch. But the 22-year-old player from Malta,…
Some memes explode into the collective consciousness with no remorse or regret, frothing at the mouth and daring hapless bystanders to remain out of the loop. One way or another, you’ll learn what they mean, and you’ll get sick of them in two weeks, just like God intended. Others, however, slink around in their own…
Popular content creator Jack “CouRage” Dunlop is leaving Twitch, he announced today. Unlike other recent Twitch departees, he’s not going to Mixer. Instead, he’s struck a deal with YouTube and will stream exclusively there. In a video announcing the change, CouRage—who has already been on YouTube since 2013 and has 1.86 million subscribers—described wanting to…
The equation underlying Sophia “Djarii” White’s Twitch stream is really pretty simple. She loves video games, art, and makeup, so she combines those things to express herself, resulting in intricate paintings where her body is the canvas. White’s talent is immediately clear, and yet, she has courted no small amount of controversy for simply doing…
While it’s possible to split hairs all day over which metrics definitively determine whether someone is the top streamer on Twitch, there’s no denying that Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek is one of the platform’s biggest stars. Or, he was. Now he’s moving to Mixer. Grzesiek has a Twitch follower count of over seven million and a…
Last year during E3, streaming megastar Tyler “Ninja” Blevins took two days off from his regular schedule. A blip on the radar in the grand scheme of things. It cost him 40,000 paying subscribers. This seemed to issue a grim warning to other streamers: Take time off at your own peril. Recently, though, it’s begun…
Donald Trump got a Twitch channel, from which he’s currently livestreaming a rally in Minneapolis. This is how we live now. As of this writing, Trump’s channel has almost 9,000 followers, and about 8,700 are watching his rally in Minnesota. The chat is moving rapidly, but there are walls of “IMPEACH,” as well as a…
Today, an armed gunman in Halle, Germany attacked people outside of a synagogue on Yom Kippur, one of the holiest days on the Jewish calendar, killing two and injuring at least two others in the process. He livestreamed his attack on Twitch, during which he referred to himself as “Anon” (likely referencing 4chan or 8chan)…
Transgender nonprofit Trans Lifeline is running a streaming fundraiser this month. This week, in tandem with several events relevant to LGBTQ rights, the lineup will consist entirely of trans streamers. Trans Lifeline runs two programs: a crisis line serving and staffed by trans people and a program offering guidance and financial assistance for trans people…
These days, Twitch streaming is an avalanche that drowns potential viewers in a daily rush of new names and faces. No matter how much you watch Twitch, you’ll never be able to keep up with even a fraction of the tens of thousands of partners and their daily streams, which generally last multiple hours. As…
The sun is bright. Blinding, almost. It is late afternoon on the last day of TwitchCon, and I have been waiting in line for 40 minutes. I’m not in the convention center, but rather, about half a mile away, outside a San Diego pizza restaurant called Ciro’s. The line wraps around the building. Well over…
“You can ruffle your feathers at people. It’s fucking great. I love that game! Who plays Goose Game?” Blink 182 bassist and vocalist Mark Hoppus bellowed to a cheering crowd at last night’s TwitchCon party. The band headlined the party, which was open to all attendees and took place in a stadium in San Diego.…
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