Kai Cenat broke Twitch’s streaming records, but Twitch itself has seen its viewership dwindle

After streaming on the platform 24 hours a day for 30 days, content creator Kai Cenat broke the record for the most subscribers on Twitch, hitting 727,700 by the end of November… and generating an estimated $3.6 million in revenue in the process, per CNBC.

The “subathon” — a livestreaming event where every new subscription or donation extends the duration of the stream — concluded on November 30 after featuring celebrity guests like Snoop Dogg and Kevin Hart, as well as hours upon hours of its star, uninterrupted even when sleeping. Still, the event saw Cenat gain ~660,000 new subscribers in November alone, per data from TwitchTracker, with over 70% of them opting to pay $4.99 a month for features like ad-free viewing.

While Cenat will now be enjoying meals and bathroom breaks without thousands of eyes on him, he will also be celebrating becoming the biggest streamer on the internet, with more than 36 million followers across Twitch, YouTube, Instagram, and X. Twitch execs will be celebrating, too: the company typically takes a 50% cut of subscriber revenues (though this share is reduced to 30%-40% for top creators). Cenat’s achievements will be good news for the Amazon-owned company, which remains unprofitable despite its acquisition by the tech giant a decade ago.

The fact that Twitch remains in the red is somewhat surprising, considering how much the platform boomed during the pandemic. Total hours watched on the platform surged a whopping 47% in a month in April 2020 off the back of bedroom-bound gamers, vloggers, and DJs. Despite its online clout, Twitch has struggled to bring in enough revenue to cover its costs, causing difficulties in incentivizing its creators and leading to the company infamously withdrawing from South Korea at the start of the year due to expensive network fees. More recently, Twitch viewership has fallen, suggesting that like e-commerce, DIY, and virtual fitness classes, the pandemic seems to have only “brought forward” the rise of content streaming rather than permanently altering its trajectory.