Twitch has been around since 2011, and it only seems to be going up. In just a few years, Twitch has gone from this niche live streaming website to a major factor in the online entertainment world.
If you don’t know what twitch is, let me clue you in. Twitch is an online live streaming website where people can stream themselves playing video games, making music, cooking, or just their life in general. If you’re lucky enough you can actually make streaming your full time job. Now that may sound stupid but it’s true.
Twitch has created a wave of new internet celebrities that entertain millions of people from all across the world every day. So let’s take a closer look at how Twitch and streamers have achieved this success.
Twitch really started to make an impact in mainstream media around the late 2010s to early 2020s. When Fortnite was the most popular game in the world, streamers started to take advantage of that and started streaming the game to viewers. There were tons of people that found success doing this, but there’s really only one that found success.
Tyler Blevins, AKA Ninja, was at his peak viewership when he streamed him playing Fortnite with Drake, Travis Scott, and JuJu Smith-Schuster. That’s a stacked lobby if you ask me. Ninja managed to pull in more than 600,000 viewers to his stream. Although the exact amount of money he made during that stream with Drake wasn’t publicly disclosed, it’s estimated that he made around $500,000 to $1 million in that one stream and that’s excluding the $5,000 Drake wager that he won.
One of the biggest nights in streaming history 🎮
Ninja, Drake, JuJu Smith-Schuster and Travis Scott gave us a Fortnite lobby for the ages three years ago. pic.twitter.com/bE3zHFDRKJ
— ESPN (@espn) March 15, 2021
After Fortnite slowly stopped trending, Twitch was kinda back at square 1 with its viewership. That is until around the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. When there was nothing to do but stay home, people decided to take up different hobbies and some people took up streaming. Then a new game started trending. Among Us is a game where players work together on a space-themed mission, but some are secretly impostors trying to sabotage and eliminate the crew. Streamers like Sykkuno, Corpse Husband, Disguised Toast, and Valkyrie. heck even already big internet celebrities, like PewDiePie and XQC started to hop on the Among Us craze. Sykkuno was able to pull in over 13,000 viewers in one Among Us stream. Now I know you can’t really compare Sykkuno’s 13,000 viewer peak to Ninja’s 600,000 viewer peak. But you gotta admit, 13,000 viewers is still a massive amount of viewers.
this was the scariest place to be at in 2020 pic.twitter.com/vi3Ku9juyY
— kira 👾 (@kirawontmiss) May 12, 2024
Fast forward a few years later to around mid 2023. A streamer that really started to make waves was Jynxzi. A streamer that mainly played Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege and a few other games as well. Now you may be asking yourself, how come Jynxzi got popular even though his main game wasn’t a massive game at the time compared to Fortnite and Among Us. Well, I got an answer for you. Jynxzi had an interesting twist when it came to his streams. Each stream he focused heavily on viewer engagement. This kinda explains how he blew up out of nowhere. Whether it be reacting to video game clips that his viewers sent him or just reading his chat. Jynxzi saw this success and continued to do it and it only grew him even more. One of his streams nearly reached 100,000 viewers in one stream. Before Jynxzi saw this success, he was streaming to practically nobody for over a year. This goes to show that hard work really does pay off.
Another streamer that seems to get bigger and bigger is CaseOh. Just like Jynxzi, he also kinda blew up out of nowhere. CaseOh got popular because his viewers made fun of his weight. Now this may seem a bit insensitive but CaseOh actually embraces it. The most infamous clip of him is when one of his viewers compared him looking like a one by one lego piece. This one clip skyrocketed his viewership, going from averaging under 1,000 viewers a stream to averaging 50,000 viewers a stream and his viewership only seems to be going up every day.
https://twitter.com/3vi1j0rdan/status/1785045041469084100
Twitch has come a long way, creating internet celebrities like Ninja and responding to trends like Among Us. Streamers like Jynxzi and CaseOh prove that engagement and uniqueness can lead to big success. As Twitch evolves, its impact on online entertainment remains strong.