Stream Big: The Triumphs and Turmoils of Twitch and the Stars Behind the Screen

introduction

why twitch matters

The elevator pitch for Twitch, back in its earliest days, seemed tailor-made to be met with incredulity. "You wanna watch someone else play video games? Instead of playing them yourself? What’s the point?" But that was 2011, and this is now: Twitch has become the largest livestreaming service on the World Wide Web, with over 7 million creators broadcasting to over 100 million viewers per month. Twitch’s founders, clearly, were onto something. For millennials and Gen Z, the platform took a near-universal childhood experience—sitting next to a friend on the couch and cracking jokes as they hopped, bopped, floundered, and flubbed their way through a new video game—and removed all geographic boundaries.

When Twitch first launched, the idea of a creator barely existed. YouTube had only been around for a handful of years, and there were few reliable pathways toward a sustainable income for those populating the internet with entertainment. Twitch played a major role in providing accessible means by which creators could generate an income, implementing ideas like paid subscriptions to individual streamers, which ultimately led to consistent work schedules and a crop of creators that didn’t just fizzle out. As a result, Twitch was able to pioneer many of the features and outsized personalities that form the DNA of the modern internet that we now take for granted on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and whatever social media platforms might come after. Meanwhile, the unique alchemy produced by streamers and chat—a rectangular box next to every broadcast where viewers can react in real time—birthed a community like none other. The presence of chat meant that streamers and viewers were in a constant dialogue with each other, producing an endless torrent of memes and ideas that continually reinforced the foundations of a larger community. In the old days, Twitch was in on it, too, regularly soliciting streamers for feedback and hiring numerous employees from said community of streamers, viewers, and tinkerers. It even went so far as to commemorate this by adopting a slogan from a community member (whom it eventually hired): Bleed Purple. This simple sound bite spread like wildfire because it encapsulated a sentiment common among early Twitch users: that they were part of a rambunctious, strong family, even if there were only thousands of them at that point. It did not take long for Twitch to transform from a loyal family into a juggernaut technology company and a driver of both video game sales and culture. There were other, bigger platforms out there at first, but none of them were even remotely like Twitch. And so, it grew and grew and grew.

As of 2023, over 2.5 million concurrent viewers were watching Twitch at any given moment, putting it in league with—and often well beyond—mainstream television networks like CNN and Fox during prime-time slots and major events. According to Twitch’s own stats, that added up to 1.3 trillion minutes—or 22.4 billion hours—watched in a single year. Alongside stats from unofficial trackers that have been monitoring Twitch since its inception, that puts Twitch’s lifetime hours-watched total at 105.3 billion. This reflects the platform’s broadened appeal: Where once Twitch attracted a small subset of gamers who primarily tuned in to watch tournaments between players of the highest skill levels—aka esports—Twitch streamers now cater to every imaginable niche—arts and crafts, news and politics, travel and outdoors, music and concerts, and even just sitting around and chatting. Young people visit the site to be entertained and informed—or, depending on who they choose to watch, for their daily dose of reality TV−like drama. Streamers, in turn, keep them company for hours and hours every day, whether while out and about or from the comfort of their bedrooms.

You might hear that job description and think it sounds cushy, but the truth is rarely so glamorous. Streaming—even just the garden-variety play video games from your room version—is work. Top streamers broadcast nearly every day of the week, often for eight to twelve hours per day. They can’t just sit there and stare blankly at a screen, either; if they’re not lively, animated, and talkative, audiences will go find someone who can better hold their attention. Twitch’s secret sauce, interactive chat, is also its greatest challenge: Chat is akin to an anthill where every ant hopes to be individually acknowledged. Streamers are expected to keep a running dialogue with their chats, even when they’re comprised of tens or hundreds of thousands of concurrent viewers. At the highest levels, it’s like performing for a stadium full of insatiable onlookers.

The streamer-chat dynamic makes for broadcasts that, much like video games themselves, are interactive. Depending on the particular community, chatters might try to get a rise out of a streamer, help them through a difficult portion of a game, or even aid a streamer when they’re clearly going through a hard time in their personal life. This, too, can be a double-edged sword: Few fans are as loyal as those of Twitch streamers, but lines get blurry quickly. While many viewers pop in for just an hour or two here and there, others watch—actively or while working, doing chores, etc.—for the full eight-plus-hour gamut every day. As a result of this, they come to believe that they truly know a particular streamer, or that perhaps through repeated, fleeting interactions, they’re becoming friends. This largely one-sided connection has become known as a parasocial relationship. The potential pitfalls of this new form of fame are many. For instance, I spoke to two different streamers, Ben CohhCarnage Cassell and Ben DrLupo Lupo, about their respective approaches to an especially heartbreaking dilemma: Viewers will occasionally come into chat and feel comfortable enough to discuss the craterous lows of their mental health, up to and including suicidal ideations. But Twitch streamers are not therapists; they do not have the tools to capably and safely diffuse these situations or the emotional bandwidth to engage with such viewers regularly. Streamers and their teams have found that they must resist the urge to give longtime fans a shoulder to cry on, and instead develop comprehensive plans to pass them along to more capable sets of hands, lest the streamers risk the slow, painful dissolution of their communities.

It’s tempting to believe that what happens online stays online, but some fans take their adoration so far that they show up in creators’ home cities—and even on their doorsteps. Best-case scenario, these uncalled-for meet and greets prove alarming but ultimately harmless. A couple streamers I spoke with, however, experienced much more harrowing outcomes. In 2021, Kaitlyn Amouranth Siragusa had garbage outside her home set on fire by a suspected arsonist, and on two separate occasions in 2022 and 2023 dealt with a stalker she believes flew to her location all the way from Estonia. Clara Keffals Sorrenti, meanwhile, felt the full fury of what she’s termed parasocial hatred from a pair of websites dedicated to unearthing targets’ most intimate information: their childhoods, careers, family connections, and locations. This resulted in a so-called swatting—in which bad actors online trick a fully armed SWAT team into showing up at a creator’s place of residence—and a series of forced relocations to evade potentially mortal peril.

This kind of toxic relationship can sometimes go the other way. Another creator, Dream, found himself embroiled in controversy after leveraging his own parasocial fame to get too close to fans for others’ comfort—exchanging flirtatious DMs and, according to accounts that Dream disputes, sometimes taking things even further. Revelations linked to this pattern of behavior led to a community schism: For months, fans and ex-fans exchanged verbal volleys and dominated Twitter trending topics in a seemingly endless dispute over whether their formerly wholesome streamer had gone too far.

Despite appearances, most Twitch channels are group efforts. This starts with moderation—keeping chat from getting too rowdy, typically on a volunteer basis—but big names hire and often pay other people to help them with tasks as far ranging as video editing, stat tracking, negotiating deals, scheduling, and running in-game guilds. Top streamers are now enterprises unto themselves; Cassell, for example, is backed by a team of twenty-seven, thirteen of whom receive regular compensation for their roles. Siragusa, one of livestreaming’s biggest female stars, runs her own company of eighteen and retains additional teams to advise her on financial and legal matters. Hasan HasanAbi Piker keeps his operation much leaner, but he’s nonetheless become a political institution, coordinating with the well-oiled machines of nationally known figures like U.S. representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and presidential aspirant Marianne Williamson for blockbuster broadcasts. They see in Piker what numerous companies see in Twitch streamers: the opportunity to reach an audience often unavailable even to household-name celebrities, with an intimacy and a face that audience legitimately trusts.

Yet it also must be noted that in the grand scheme of Twitch—and online platforms in general—megastar creators are anomalies. In the wake of a 2021 Twitch leak that revealed creator pay across the platform, pundits pointed out that just 25 percent of Twitch’s top ten thousand highest-paid streamers made minimum wage or greater. That’s far less than 1 percent of the millions of total streamers. The notion, then, that this is a burgeoning new career field, where anybody can succeed if they just try hard enough, is patently false. This mirrors other platforms like YouTube, where under 1 percent of creators generate an income. But the modern platform landscape is a little more complicated than those stats make it out to be. Many people have come to use online platforms—especially TikTok—to advertise preexisting businesses and events. Content creation has become a means to an end, rather than the end itself, and creators a piece of a much larger puzzle. This presents additional moneymaking opportunities to both full-time content creators and those who start accounts to draw attention to, say, stores or video games. But it also means that growing and maintaining a presence on these platforms is a multifaceted full-time job, even if you’re not being paid like it. On YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, as well as Twitch, you have to be a savvy businessperson on top of being a talented content creator to turn views into revenue; moneymaking on these platforms is often tied up in sponsored deals with third-party brands, which creators have to be proactive about seeking out. Rather than a passive-income or get-rich-quick scheme, being a streamer is hard work. Breaking in requires not just a dedication to streaming for hours per day, but deals, connections, and a panther-like instinct for pouncing on opportunities when they present themselves. Take the story of Emme Negaoryx Montgomery, who pushed so hard to capitalize on a viral stream moment, her thirteen seconds of fame, that she ended up breaking a rib. But still, she decided to soldier on, streaming as much as possible and attending numerous events… until she broke another. This torrid period took such a physical and emotional toll on her that she ultimately had to step away from Twitch for a time.

These may not all be names you’ve heard before, but they are by almost any measure famous, with millions and millions across the globe hanging on their every word—and regarding their every game and product endorsement as gospel. It’s no surprise, then, that shortly after Twitch began to sniff success, companies began salivating in its general direction. Ultimately, Amazon—a colossus among tech giants, one of the biggest companies in the world—acquired Twitch in 2014, ushering in a new era that crept in subtly but surely. Twitch, flush with newfound resources, initially passed what it could on to creators in the form of flashy new features. But the company also grew at a dizzying pace and ultimately lost its way. Indebted to a corporate benefactor cracking its knuckles with increasing impatience at the idea of extracting a profit, Twitch over time drifted from its community-first focus to a more nakedly money-grubbing model. This meant underpaying streamers—many of whom already struggled to earn a living wage while providing Twitch with the majority of its content—relative to other platforms and pressuring them to run regular barrages of broadcast-interrupting ads, decisions widely disliked by both streamers and viewers. Monetization-related features moved to the forefront as the company’s commitment to its community—once expressed by in-person, feedback-gathering appearances at numerous events and close connections with individual streamers—receded into the halls of history. Twitch is not alone in this regard. In recent times, Twitter (now X) has massively degraded its product in pursuit of profit, laying off staff in droves, transforming a once-useful verification system into a subscription service meant to confer privilege to those vain enough to pay, and repeatedly breaking features large and small that users didn’t even think were in need of fixing. More subtly, TikTok has pushed its shopping and e-commerce features to the forefront, transforming the app from a portal to a world of quirky discoveries to basically the same thing as any other social video platform, with every discovery starting or ending with somebody trying to sell you something.

That does not change the reality, however, that platforms are defined by the people who use them—Twitch perhaps most of all. Its culture is unique, born of hyper-passionate niches that through technology became supercharged into a pastime with a global audience. Where, say, YouTube could be likened to a nation with highways and byways crisscrossing between disparate states, Twitch is more like a city where all the major players know each other. Everybody uses the same lingo, references the same touchstones. Cameos are common, especially among the top streamers. If all the creators and viewers responsible left tomorrow, Twitch would no longer be Twitch. This is the central tension at the heart of the platform: Twitch might bleed purple, but people are livestreaming’s beating heart regardless of which brand’s flag they fly. And yet, as Twitch, the company, has grown in terms of viewership, prominence, and prosperity, it has strayed further and further from this north star. Communication has grown indirect and oftentimes insufficient, resulting in confusion and controversy. Streamers have come to feel like stones being squeezed for every last ounce of profit rather than pillars of a platform that values each of them individually. Viewers have ceased to view Twitch as a special little slice of the internet, as a driver of online culture. Now it’s just a delivery mechanism for content.

In the process of reporting, I came to realize there was only one lens through which to tell Twitch’s story: the creators themselves. Rather than by putting together a chronological account of Twitch’s financial triumphs and tribulations through its various eras, Twitch is better understood through its streamers. The innovations, personalities, and struggles of nine exemplary streamers reveal why Twitch is one of the most important internet culture and business stories of the twenty-first century. The goal is to paint a holistic portrait of both Twitch as a platform and, more importantly, the people who through hard work took livestreaming from a hobby to a behemoth.

Viewers often feel like they know their favorite streamers, but the truth is, even in the most revealing moments, fans are still getting a show, a performance. Following streamers in their everyday lives shines a light on what it really means to be a content creator contending with Big Tech and the toxicity of the internet: the ups and the downs, the fears and the insecurities, even the unglamorous busywork that undergirds the whole operation. Technological innovation is often not a top-down process, but one where content creators bootstrap solutions or demand features, and these in turn took Twitch’s business to the next level. To demonstrate these dynamics, I met streamers where they were at, spending days with them in their homes and at events, and communicating back and forth with them for months or years after. But on Twitch, creators are only part of the equation; sometimes they’re not even the stars of the show. I also spoke to dozens of friends, family members, fans of streamers, and Twitch employees. I endeavored to examine these people who are also, increasingly, becoming institutions themselves with staffs of anywhere from a few to a few dozen and empires worth tens of millions of dollars. This collage of stories demonstrates how creators have shaped and been shaped by Twitch, an ever-evolving platform, from its unassuming rise to its celeb-stacked pandemic boom to what’s beginning to look like a fall—or perhaps a slow descent into corporate malaise.

But Twitch, whose live format renders it trapped in an eternal present, never stops marching forward. By the time you read this, the streamers depicted in this book will doubtless have entered new chapters in their lives and careers. The stories I tell here are messy and inconclusive because they’re still unfolding. However, these snapshots document pivotal moments in the lives of streamers, capturing the days and weeks that will define the years to come for Twitch as an entity. It’s impossible to say in what state Twitch, the brand, will be in months or years down the line, but the site’s true exports—its community and culture—will continue to inform content creation, the internet economy, and how millions of people interact online. Twitch will always be a platform by the people, even if it one day stops being for them.

chapter one

community

Some people just look the part of what they do. There’s no universe in which Beyoncé doesn’t become a pop star. The Rock appears to have been hewn from solid granite. Nicholas Braun, aka Cousin Greg on the HBO show Succession, was born to play that exact kind of guy. As far as people who’ve worked at Twitch go, this is Marcus DJWheat Graham. Whether he’s broadcasting from his office or chilling on his couch, the now-forty-five-year-old, salt-and-pepper-haired livestreaming pioneer is all wide expressions and big gestures. He moves like a cartoon character, as though he was animated to captivate. His voice booms no matter what he’s discussing, the volume knob on his enthusiasm level evidently stuck at 11, never to so much as glance at 10. You can just see, almost immediately, why this person in particular was one of the first successful video game streamers, predating even Twitch itself. Graham can talk for hours and hours and hours, and then more hours after that. He will; it’s just who he is. But you’ll find it impossible to look away, like a snake under the spell of a master charmer.

Right now, he’s talking about pinball machines, which he’s turned into the centerpiece of the lower floor of his Nebraska home.

You never have the same game twice. So the adage of ‘Once you get a pinball machine, they multiply’ is totally true, he says, gesturing toward favorites based on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and The Mandalorian. They’re amazing, and they’re actually better investments than, say, an NFT or something. They have been skyrocketing in price over the pandemic, partially because manufacturing costs have gone up and they produce less machines, but also people are like, ‘I want things to do.’

Graham’s appreciation of these machines is infectious. The craftsmanship of a good pinball machine, he explains, is a thing of beauty—a clockwork assemblage of flippers, knobs, springs, switches, lights, and speakers meant to spirit you away to some fantastical realm (or a sewer where giant turtles eat pizza) amid the din of a crowded arcade or bar.

This passion, this attention to detail, is what turned him into one of the first prominent esports commentators, one of the first well-known gaming livestreamers, and eventually, one of the first Twitch employees. Where Graham goes, people gather to listen—a quality that came in handy back when he began his career. In the late nineties, when Graham first started commentating over competitive games, there was barely an American esports scene to speak of. There certainly wasn’t software designed with the idea in mind or an easy means by which to broadcast online to more than a small handful of people. This eventually led him to streaming, which he also got into when the medium was in a larval form.

Graham’s career was only possible because of the people he was able to draw to his early, hacked-together broadcasts. He owes everything to the community he helped build, which in turn built him. This, more than anything else, is the lesson he’s taken to heart: Community is key. It’s the soul of his operation, the gasoline that fuels his passion.

It’s why he joined Twitch. It’s also why he left.

THANKS TO HIS dad, Graham grew up with a keen interest in radio. This led to a broadcast journalism major in college, which in turn led to a realization.

I realized that radio was fucking dumb, Graham says. And what I mean by that is, radio has such a limited audience. And I’m discovering that as I’m realizing the internet is the future, right?

So in 1997, after he’d graduated and begun working an IT job, Graham went to his local Best Buy and picked up a gadget that claimed it would let him start his own radio station online. Unfortunately, its audience was significantly more limited than radio’s.

One of the bullets on the back of the box was ‘Start your own radio station’ with an asterisk next to it, Graham says. Like, you know, you need to have this stuff to run this, and of course I’m like, ‘Well, fuck the asterisk.’ I took it home and realized I could have five, at max ten people listen. But getting those first ten people for esports stuff was amazing.

Graham’s game of choice at the time was Quake III, a multiplayer-focused entry in a classic sci-fi first-person shooter series without which modern genre pillars like Halo, Destiny, and Apex Legends wouldn’t exist. But at the time, online gaming was still relatively new, and competitions with money up for grabs were a niche within a niche, especially in North America. Big matches were infrequent and inconsistent, and central sources for news about them were difficult—sometimes impossible—to come by.

Initially, Graham commentated largely for the benefit of a Quake team he was coaching; he’d watch their games and record notes for them about how they were playing. It was a teammate who gave him the idea to start broadcasting to the (relative) masses.

[My teammate] was like, ‘Hey, you should do this live like you’re covering sports,’ says Graham. And I was like, ‘Yeah, why not?’

With the help of an old friend (who’s since gone on to work at Meta), Graham managed to set up a server on a media service called Shoutcast that allowed him to reach more people than his previous, severely limited approach. At the time, this was about as good as it got.

We filled up that five-hundred-person Shoutcast server almost right away, says Graham. And it was, like, the most atrocious thing ever. I had no idea what I was doing. I wasn’t even really thinking about it, right? It took me a little while to go, ‘Oh, now let me take my knowledge of radio and apply that to making an opening intro, [explaining] why you should care about this game, post-game interviews—you know, getting it all together actually.’

Radio expertise proved valuable on the tech side of things as well. Though Graham’s setup at the time was rudimentary, the bones of it were not so different from hardware utilized by modern streamers.

It was hard as hell back then, he says. Even trying to get mics to work and stuff was unbelievable. Nowadays everyone’s got a [studio-quality microphone], and back then we were getting stick mics from Walmart…. But because of all the radio experience, I basically built a radio console that I could plug into a computer, which is what a lot of streamers still do today.

What Graham and his friends didn’t recognize was that by broadcasting to nascent gaming audiences, they were also tapping into a force that would become essential to the DNA of livestreaming as we now know it: interactivity. Quake fans would gather in text-based internet relay chat (IRC) rooms and react to what was happening in matches, offer their own opinions, and of course, tell Graham when he was screwing up. (The latter desire, it should be noted, has powered far more pivotal instances of human ingenuity than anybody is willing to admit.)

Someone could be like, ‘Wheat, you’re an idiot,’ and I could respond to them immediately, says Graham. We had a little bit more delay back then, but I was blown away by this instant interaction that we saw take place. So it wasn’t just the commentary part of it. Once it got tied to IRC, suddenly it became the interactive experience that I think people really love today.

It’s this alchemic reaction of broadcasters and viewers/listeners creating collectively—cheering, jeering, and building on each other’s ideas in real time—that would later go on to define livestreaming as a medium. No longer was a broadcaster like Graham simply talking at audiences and occasionally taking listener calls or running contests. The two sides of the equation had become connected, tethered by a moment in time regardless of space. Graham knew he was onto something. But the road to fully realizing his vision of the future would prove longer than expected. And much, much bumpier.

IN THE EARLY 2000s, Graham took his first crack at making a career out of this whole talking over video games thing. He’d been commentating on larger and larger tournaments, and people with deeper pockets had begun to take notice. In 2004, Graham hit the jackpot: an American esports upstart called the Global Gaming League. Its owners, flush with investment cash, convinced Graham and his wife to uproot from Nebraska and move to Los Angeles for the purposes of taking esports and video game content to the next level.

GGL let me experiment with livestreaming like crazy, says Graham. They were helping me pay bandwidth bills that were absurd. I went to them and said, ‘I want a livestream from [annual video game news conference] E3,’ and they were like, ‘Great, what do we need to do to make that happen?’ I said, ‘You just gotta get a $25,000 internet pipe to the booth on top of [what you’d already normally pay to be there].’ They’d be like, ‘Awesome!’

Even mainstream celebrities were beginning to suspect there might be gold in gaming’s still-untapped hills.

"GGL let us put together a hip-hop gaming league that had Snoop Dogg as a commissioner [and] Method Man and Eric V. playing Madden against each other, says Graham. We were doing shit way, way, way ahead of its time."

However, this also marked the beginning of a pattern that would ultimately echo forward to Graham’s time at Twitch: a company making good, forward-thinking decisions, followed by bad decisions, followed by decent decisions, followed by worse decisions. For Graham, it was whiplash inducing.

They would do these great esports events, he says. They were paying players. They were putting out good prize money. They were getting good sponsors. But then they’d do something stupid like say, ‘We want to rename esports to vsports so then we can own the name.’ So you can imagine what it was like, especially for me—knowing what you know about me and Twitch—working for a company that has these moments of brilliance and then the dumbest fucking ideas you could ever imagine.

Needless to say, vsports, as a name, did not catch on.

Graham got an even bigger break in 2005, when a television producer named Mike Burks approached him at an esports event he was casting.

I think I was casting in a Hawaiian shirt, says Graham. It was all sorts of goofy, awkward gaming nerd geekiness happening here. Occasionally you’d see a mom that came with their kid or whatever.

Burks, not from the world of gaming at all, stood out—his twenties a distant memory, very tall and rocking a hairstyle older (both in fashion and literal age) than any of the competitors at the event. Burks was impressed by Graham’s ability to commentate effectively all by his lonesome without a large behind-the-scenes crew feeding data into his ear like traditional sports broadcasters typically had. Burks revealed to Graham that he was working with DirecTV on a pilot for what would become the company’s esports offering: the Championship Gaming Series (CGS). Graham leaped at the opportunity to ascend beyond his small online niche and grasp at televised legitimacy.

I wouldn’t give up the experience ever, says Graham. It was years of live television. I don’t know where I could have ever gotten better experience. It was brutally hard.

But CGS was vanishingly short-lived, beginning with a pilot in 2006 and then folding in 2008 after just two regular seasons. Graham estimates that DirecTV spent tens of millions of dollars on CGS, but it failed to find the kind of audience the company was looking for. This, too, served as a lesson for Graham, albeit one of a different, more sobering sort.

I think working for DirecTV is the first time I started seeing, ‘Oh shit, this is how companies exploit gaming for advertising dollars, profit, etc.,’ he says. On one hand, I was OK with that because they were at least pushing the envelope. But the reality of it is, two years later when they shut everything down, you feel the hangover of it all. Gaming is also the first thing [companies] are willing to jettison.

This left Graham at a loss. His grand hope for gaming had failed, and the traditional entertainment industry rejected him like white blood cells fending off an infectious disease.

I started realizing there was no landscape for people like me [in LA], he says. I had conversations with William Morris [now WME] where I basically pitched them the idea of Twitch, and they were like, ‘This shit is never going to be big,’ and laughed me out of their offices. It was absolutely crushing.

Faced with a lack of direction and mounting financial uncertainty, Graham and his wife moved back to Nebraska, and Graham resumed working in IT. It was, as he describes it, a long fall from his lofty days in live television, but it was a living. But when the content creation bug first bit him, it had burrowed deep. Despite the near-fatal damage prior years had done to his spirits, Graham resumed creating shows on a website of his own in 2009. To support his hobby, he made his PayPal info public. After just forty-eight hours, viewers had kicked in $5,000.

At the time I was like, ‘Oh my fucking god. That’s huge. I don’t even know what to do with this,’ says Graham, echoing a sentiment Twitch streamers—supported