Sunday afternoon around 2 p.m., Ludwig Ahgren, a Twitch streamer in Los Angeles, turned on his camera and started streaming. He did not stop.
For the past five days, Mr. Ahgren maintained an almost constant flow of life throughout his life. He plays video games, chats, cooks, eats and sleeps, all on stream. In the evenings, he hosts movie nights with his viewers. Mr. Ahgren lives with five roommates and his girlfriend, and some of them also play a role on camera to help him cook or collaborate.
He even streamed in the shower (wearing shorts).
It’s all part of what’s a ‘subathon’ on Twitch. A subathon is a short time in which a streamer participates in certain activities or tricks to build up paid subscriptions on his or her channel. Some streamers set numerical targets. For example, if they reach 2000 new subs, they will eat something spicy on camera or play a specific game for fans.
Mr. Ahgren, 25, structured his subathon so that each new entry adds another ten seconds to a clock that determines how long he will stream. When Mr. Ahgren set things up like that, he imagined he would stream a maximum of 24 hours, maybe 48 hours. Five days later, his subathon stream blew up and became the top stream on Twitch, paying tens of thousands of new subscribers daily as fans to see how long he could go. He has received more than 40,000 new subscriptions since he started streaming.
“The strangest thing is every time I wake up, it feels like it’s getting bigger,” he said. Ahgren said. ‘Last night I went to bed with 30,000 viewers and 60,000 participants. I woke up and was with 70,000 viewers and 70,000 attendees. ”
This is because while Mr. Ahgren sleeps, an army of fans working overtime to maximize his subscribers. They chat and play YouTube clips and videos for each other to keep the channel entertaining. Ahgren’s name has appeared twice on Twitter in the past week, both times while he was sleeping.
“At night, the rest of us do his content for him,” said a 21-year-old college student who passes by Happygate and acts as one of Mr. Ahgren is the moderator. “We try to keep everyone excited and motivated to keep it going for as long as possible.”
“The sleep streams were really interesting,” said Stephen Seaver, 15, a high school student in Georgia. ‘What’s really happening is his mods’ – that’s short for moderators -‘ start with a Discord call and they call and talk all the time and shoot their head out for subs. The idea is that it’s funny, while he sleeps, the timer goes up. ”
Sleep streams have become popular throughout the pandemic on Twitch and TikTok, with fans saying they enjoy the late-night pop-up communities that facilitate sleep streams. Creators love them because they can literally make money while they sleep.
“I fell asleep upstream last night and became the most watched streamer on Twitch,” said Mr. Ahgren said tweeted Monday. “What is it even?” Later Monday night, Twitch wished Mr. Ahgren “good nightFrom his official Twitter account.
Twitch, which has been owned by Amazon since 2014, has quickly become popular in recent years. The site has already expanded from a place where gamers could broadcast their play Fortnite and Call of Duty in a broader platform that includes lifestyle, cuisine and political currents. The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated growth as people sitting at home were looking for online entertainment.
Erin Wayne, head of community and creative marketing at Twitch, said that streams like those of Mr. Ahgren appears more on the platform. “This is the idea of multiplayer entertainment, where the community is able to influence the content that a creator creates, will continue to become popular,” she said. ‘The person consuming the content can have a direct influence, and can in some cases determine what happens in the content they consume. It’s so peculiar to Twitch. I think this is why these types of marathons or subscriber streams are so popular. ”
The stream of mr. Ahgren can be seen as an extension of the tendency for creators to earn more and more parts of their lives, from daily decisions about what to eat or wear to whom they should visit. Streams like him can yield a deeper connection with fans, who view the subathon as a shared shared experience.
“No matter what time of day you turn on, his stream is on, and you will see many familiar faces in the chat,” Nathan Grayson, a game reporter, wrote at Kotaku. “It only takes three days, but it already feels like comfort food.”
It was this kind of comfort and commitment that Mr. Seaver said, ‘While the content of the stream may not be particularly special, it’s the fact that you’re all part of this community that is watching this truly rare event,’ he said. ‘You can watch Ludwig’s whole life for days. It’s not great for him, but you get so much content out of it and you get that you came together as a community and were able to see this thing happen. ‘
As a result, more and more people were able to earn their living by streaming full-time on the platform, with a handful of top-earning streamers earning more than $ 1 million a year, according to a September study by online lender CashNetUS.
Twitch’s growth reflects the overall boom in the gambling industry by 2020. Stay-at-home orders, coupled with the release of a new generation of video games from Microsoft and Sony in November, led to a financial bonanza; gamers spent a record $ 56.9 billion in the United States last year, up 27 percent from 2019, according to the NPD Group.
Although Mr. Ahgren has already made six figures out of his stream, urging his young fans to be responsible with their money. “I just told them, ‘Hey, don’t use my prick test on me,'” he said. “Make sure your bread is ready before you give it away.”
No one knows how long Mr. Ahgren can last. Other Twitch streamers have been streaming for more than 31 days in a row, but Mr. Ahgren said he could not imagine that things would get to that point.
He does have a trip to visit his girlfriend’s family north in a week, and he hopes things will end before then. If that does not happen, he will have to figure out a way to get his current on the road. “I think it’s a cool, one-time experience,” he said. Ahgren said about his stream. “I’m excited to wake up every day because it’s never going to happen to me again.”
Kellen Browning contribution made.