2024 was the year of livestreamers.
Twitch, launched in 2011 to livestream video games and eSports, maintained its industry reign with 5.14 billion total hours viewed in Q3 of 2024. Meanwhile, YouTube Gaming accumulated 1.94 billion hours, and KICK recorded 580 million hours.
On top of its statistical success, Twitch has legitimized itself in mainstream media from the breakthrough work of its partners. This year, popular streamer Kai Cenat partnered with Nike and McDonald’s. He also hosted numerous celebrities on-stream (Serena Williams, Kevin Hart, and Snoop Dogg, to name a few). Battling for the most subscribed account on Twitch, Cenat ended a month-long Subathon with over 727,000 subscribers, breaking the previous record by almost double.
Out of all social media and entertainment influencers, Rolling Stone named Cenat the most influential content creator of 2024. And his high-profile content is not without drama; he was swatted on Nov. 2 in the middle of his Subathon stream.
Twitch, including its streamers, is truly one of a kind. Or, it was until its easy-going, rule-averse younger sibling, KICK, hit the scene in 2022. This year, the rival platform made headlines nearly as much as Twitch.
N3on, a KICK streamer with over 381,000 followers, was streaming in May while cruising around New York City in a Lamborghini. The driver, another content creator (Squeeze Benz), crashed the car due to reckless behavior. In October, Jack Doherty, a fellow KICK streamer whose account is currently banned, crashed his McLaren while driving and streaming. He lost control of the car while looking at his phone.
Livestreaming is the next big iteration of video entertainment. Goodbye to television shows and hello to all-day-long livestreams. With such a fast-growing medium accessible to anyone 13 and up, will there still be a place for car crashes and swatting? Or is the recklessness inherent to its success?
Well, not all streamers lean into extremes for the sake of content.
The spectrum of livestreaming
Meg, known as MegKaylee on Twitch, has built a brand and community promoting positivity, acceptance, joy, and fun. Meg has been livestreaming since 2015 and has garnered over 60,000 followers. Additionally, she is a Twitch Ambassador, a role that honors streamers’ positive influences and offers direct communication with Twitch’s heads.
Since the drama of streamers like Cenat and Doherty has no role in her content, that side of Twitch feels foreign to her, Meg told the Daily Dot in an interview.
“I think a lot of [drama in the livestreaming community], to me, is just the nature of social media and the way it draws in people who are drawn to attention,” she said. “You can draw in people who want to use that for good, for the right reasons, or just ‘cause they want to share something. But then it’s also very easily an outlet where people can look and say, ‘Oh, if I go this way and I do this thing, then I’m going to get tons of people responding to me or paying attention.’”
“Unfortunately, the drama works for people,” she said.
What’s the deal with drama and livestreaming?
Granted, livestreams have always been intertwined with drama. There’s even a whole community of dedicated folks who track, engage, and consume the content made from conflict.
R/LiveStreamFail is a Reddit page with 3.5 million members. Created in 2015, the page describes itself as “the place for all things livestreaming.” For non-Reddit users, the website livestreamfails.com consolidates the clips from Reddit into one page, complete with catchy titles and all.
Among the juiciest dramas out there are bans. Look no further than streamerbans.com to track live updates of which Twitch streamers are banned. The website dashboard gives you a live list of the most recent bans, a line graph of the total number of bans each day of the past week, and live numbers of the total Twitch partners, the number of new partners, and the number of bans within the last 30 days. If that’s too much information to consume, they have an X account under the same name that auto-posts each update.
These independently run websites, trackers, and Reddit pages have no affiliation with any livestreaming platform.
However, even streamers themselves use ban drama to feed into their content. Enter: ban appeals.
Ban appeals are requests made by community members who violated rules to have streamers reconsider their ban. For the sake of democracy, the affected community members can appeal the ban and argue their case to be unbanned and welcomed back into the community without restrictions on their accounts. This process applies to both Twitch and the third-party communication application Discord, where gamers often communicate with one another. It’s safe to say these appeals lead to great content.
Search up the phrase “ban appeals” on YouTube, and countless videos from well-known creators, like Asmongold, Isaacwhy, Sodapoppin, and more, will pop up where they sift through ban appeals on either Twitch or Discord and choose whether to unban the viewer based on their response.
It seems that streamers and viewers alike not only accept the field’s affinity for drama but also actively partake in and promote it. If this is the case, is KICK’s rise to infamy truly that outlandish?
Is KICK stealing Twitch’s audience?
While Twitch maintains its history and big name in streaming, KICK might be gaining on it—and it might be because of its loose rules.
Regardless of Twitch’s love of drama, its most recent updates to its community guidelines left viewers confused about the platform’s political identity—or lack thereof. This controversy has led some viewers and streamers to turn to KICK.
Amid the Israel-Palestine conflict and responses from popular streamers like Hasan Piker (@hasanabi), Twitch updated its community guidelines where they reemphasized in a blog post to platform users that “hate has no place here.”
Over on r/LiveStreamFail, Twitch users were unhappy. One Reddit commenter called this update essentially “nothing.” Those against Piker argued that Twitch was protecting one of its biggest streamers rather than applying its own guidelines in a fair manner. A Twitch spokesperson acknowledged their audience’s critical responses in an email exchange with the Daily Dot.
“We really value feedback from our community, both on this recent rollout and on any of our work,” they wrote. “With all updates, our goal is to make Twitch the best place to stream. We think these conversations with our community are important and will continue to have them.”
Meanwhile, KICK with its laissez-faire attitude has been slowly gaining on Twitch. In October, a KICK co-founder announced on X that the platform beat Twitch in the key demographic of Spanish-speaking viewership. In addition to this milestone, KICK took the opportunity while Twitch battled backlash to reiterate support to their streamers.
The dissatisfaction with Twitch continues to grow, and KICK’s arguments for a superior streaming experience seem to gain more traction. In response to the Daily Dot’s request for comment, KICK representatives reiterated the platform’s creator-first approach to livestreaming.
“KICK has 45 million users just two years in, with 2.1 billion hours watched in 2024 alone. There are up to 10,000 creators streaming at any given time,” they said. “While storylines can dominate headlines, the reality is that KICK is changing lives for many creators, big and small, allowing them to choose livestreaming as a career.
However, like any platform with a large user base, not all streamers and viewers have had negative experiences with Twitch.
The bright side of livestreaming
On her website, Meg prides herself on “building a community and interaction-focused environment that promotes kindness and positivity,” a task she has pursued on Twitch for almost a decade now.
She acknowledges that her years-long efforts on the platform have led to different accolades than the near-overnight-success of other streamers who feed into the drama.
“I just try to remind myself that’s not the attention I would ever want,” she said. “It’s not fulfilling or purposeful and those people are not there to connect with you authentically. They’re there to eat popcorn and watch what’s going on, you know?”
Meg is right. For people like N3on and Jack Doherty, their viewers aren’t watching out of care for their well-being. On his YouTube channel with over 15 million subscribers, Doherty has a video of the time he crashed his Lamborghini. No, not his McLaren. In March of this year, Doherty crashed a different luxury car and got it on camera that time, too.
In the comments of the video, you won’t see viewers asking if he’s OK or if he needs medical assistance. Instead, viewers joke about his recklessness. “You’re the person I watch to remember how good my parents raised me,” one person said. “‘I crashed my lambo.’ My reaction: good,” another wrote. Yet, the video has over 725,000 views.
With creators racking in hundreds of thousands of views for reckless, and sometimes illegal, behavior, it begs the question of whether content creators should be role models for their audiences.
“I think a lot of us end up on a site like Twitch because we haven’t found [acceptance] in other areas of our life and we’re looking for people,” Meg said. “There’s just so many people from all different walks of life on Twitch, and when you find those communities it can just feel so warm and welcoming. And, to me, it’s really important to curate that and to do what I can to use my influence for good and to help other people.”
What will the future hold for livestreaming?
Amid all the drama this year, it’s possible that KICK streamers’ reckless actions are just growing pains of the platform.
In April, KICK admitted on X that the platform is young and is bound to make mistakes. Maybe, one day, KICK will reach the same stardom as Twitch. And, when that day comes, KICK may also have to upset parts of its viewership to safeguard everyone’s experience.
Despite livestreaming’s youth as an entertainment option and career path, Meg deeply appreciates Twitch and the life it’s provided her.
“I feel so cared for by Twitch, and it’s really refreshing because it can be so hard in this industry,” she said. “I think you work with so many different brands and it can vary how you feel regarded, and, sometimes, you feel thrown to the wolves. And I don’t feel that way with Twitch.”
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