Justin Kan, Twitch’s cofounder, just wants his favorite chess streamers to notice him. “I’m in the chat, like, giving them donations, hoping they say my name and shit,” he tells WIRED. He’s terrible at chess, but he can’t stop watching Andrea and Alexandra Botez play it on Twitch. They haven’t acknowledged him yet. He hopes they will soon.
Twitch pioneered this—the digital parasocial thing. More specifically, monetizing it on a massive scale. Exactly 10 years ago, on June 6, 2011, Twitch launched out of Justin.tv, a sort of general-purpose video livestreaming site Kan had founded four years before. Kan, who is no longer with the company, says he and his cofounders spent years ruminating on how to make people interact online and give each other money. Should they have a sidebar chatroom? (Yes.) Emotes? (Definitely.) Career potential? (Yes.) The end goal wasn’t live video; it was the creator economy. Subscribing to people doing things.
Twitch has many legacies, from the Kappa emote to the rapper Drake’s Fortnite stream with Twitch celebrity Tyler “Ninja” Blevins. Its greatest legacy, though, is trailblazing this all-enveloping world of patronized content and of gamifying online entertainment, both for the viewer and the streamer.
In late 2010, Sean “Day9” Plott, a fearsome and charismatic Starcraft II player, confided to his Justin.tv viewership that he was super stressed about loans for his graduate school tuition. Fans flooded his PayPal account with thousands of dollars in days. Even after the donation drive, viewers asked him how they could offer more support. When Justin.tv spun out Twitch as its gaming-focused arm months later, early employees asked users what sort of features they’d be into. Plott, who had migrated over, suggested subscriptions. “This made a lot of sense to me,” he later said to InvenGlobal. “Instead of the traditional media model of ‘pay first, consume second,’ an opt-in-support model allowed everyone to view for free and support if they wished.” He would become the first Twitch partner, and a subscription button would appear on his channel.
>
Supporting a Twitch streamer wasn’t like buying a Belle and Sebastian CD or even donating to an indie board game’s Kickstarter. The streamer was right there, and you were giving them money, and then they were responding to you giving them money, all in real time. A model emerged: Give $5 and get a shout-out. The sure acknowledgement tickled something in our lizard brains. Early streamers adopted text-to-speech software that, in computer-monotone, read out the messages fans attached to donations. It wasn’t long before “Please say my name out loud!” evolved into “drink bleach, asshole.” Viewers wanted recognition, but also reaction. Some streamers with strong stomachs monetized the abuse, like dunk-tank professionals.
“Text to speech was a huge turning point,” says Kacey “Kaceytron” Caviness, a top streamer who has been on the platform since 2013. “It gave the viewer this feeling that they were a part of it, like their thoughts would be heard out loud on stream.” Once, in 2015, Caviness received multiple donations repeating the lyrics to “Woo Woo Swag” by Lil B. The troll lasted for two hours and added up to $2,000. Caviness donated it all to charity.
When Twitch launched, the digital patronage model was just entering the mainstream. It preceded Patreon and OnlyFans by two and five years, respectively. Cam sites like LiveJasmin were already attracting 32 million visitors a month back then. The major difference with Twitch was its patron-to-beneficiary ratio. In 2012, Twitch hosted 2,200 average concurrent livestreams to 102,000 average concurrent viewers—or, to put it another way, that’s 46 times as many concurrent viewers as channels. Since then, that ratio has shrunk to 25 times as many viewers as live channels in 2021. (Recently, Twitch watchdog Zach Bussey pointed out that, in the spring of 2021, if a streamer attracted more than six viewers they were in the top 6.7 percent of Twitch streamers.)
Open-mouthed boomer editorials marveled at the idea that people could make a living playing video games. So modern! So attractive! But by 2017 it had become apparent that “making it” on Twitch required more than a 9-to-5 commitment. Streamers had to be on all the time to grind out followers across game genres, across time zones. With no division between work and play, free time and work time, online and offline, streamers’ precious free moments became defined by missed opportunities (something many freelancers can probably relate to). In 2018, when the Fortnite boom really catapulted Twitch into the mainstream, Ninja figured that in the hour he spent talking to The New York Times about burnout, he lost 200 or 300 subscribers. When he went to E3, he said, he lost 100,000 subscribers, or $500,000. Even his six-day honeymoon, he says, was “a calculated risk.”
If a streamer managed to attract even a small following, they weren’t just grinding out hours streaming, or even hours marathon-streaming, but hours available. Fans felt, and still feel, entitled to streamers’ time and emotional labor—on Instagram, Discord, Twitter, Snapchat. The most successful streamers still converse with viewers and offer them a chance at acknowledgement and connection. “Thank you, DarkDaddy69, for subscribing for three months!”
Kan says he thinks about this all the time—the good and the bad. At TwitchCon, he says, streamers come up to him “super stoked” and tell him that Twitch is a “great job.” “I mean, some of these guys bought a fucking house off Twitch,” he says. But at the same time, he says, the bigger Twitch gets, the more saturated it is. And the more saturated it is, the harder it is to stand out. Some streamers spend years broadcasting to no one. “That’s really the problem that creating content on the internet needs to solve.”
The creator economy isn’t a simple supply-and-demand chart of content to viewers. It is inherently aspirational: According to one poll, 54 percent of people ages 18 to 36 would become an influencer if given the opportunity. That’s also why it’s so lucrative. Yes, thousands of would-be pop stars mailed demo tapes in a time before streaming, but the record labels didn’t get to sell ads against them. Tech giants benefit massively from the infinite number of hopefuls entering the fray, *Oregon Trail–*style, to pursue a career expressing themselves and being loved. For platforms, it’s more free content to keep their users’ attention and meatier numbers on their advertising page. (In 2014, Amazon purchased Twitch for a reported $970 million.)
Ten years after Twitch’s debut, this is the creator economy. Twitch COO Sara Clemens says that while we’re still in its infancy, Twitch was “the original player.” With traditional media, there was “a lack of recognition that fans want to connect directly with creators and have a relationship, and that can be monetized really effectively,” she says. “If you have 1,000 fans willing to support you, that can be a really meaningful way to build a career.” Other industries are starting to catch up—witness the recent wave of writers monetizing their followings on Substack, or influencers soulfully peddling icky skinny teas.
Caviness says that over the past several years Twitch has really started to take its responsibility for people’s livelihoods seriously. It’s a fine line to walk—it's not an employer. Although Twitch won’t be offering health care for streamers anytime soon, it’s investing more resources in helping streamers monetize through features like gifted subscriptions or safe payment processing. It has promised to be more transparent with streamers about content takedowns and demonetization.
“Twitch knows that that's beneficial for them, too,” Caviness says. “The more we're able to focus on streaming, the better content we'll put out.”